Realistic Cybersecurity Training via Scenario Progression Management

Cybersecurity training activities are being conducted worldwide in order to address the increase in security threats that is plaguing our network-centric society. However, most of these activities take place in restricted environments, such as military organizations, or require paying high training fees. In this paper we present an open-source architecture that makes it possible to easily conduct cybersecurity training, thus lowering the barrier to entry for a large number of students and IT professionals to benefit from such activities. The core element of our architecture is a set of mechanisms for automating the scenario progression management, thus enabling activities that combine attack, forensic and defense training in realistic scenarios. We present the design and implementation of the progression management module, and its interactions with the overall training framework into which it was integrated. Our evaluation of the architecture from both functionality and performance perspectives demonstrates that it meets the requirements for realistic training activities, and that progression management introduces only a low execution overhead.