Facility

Cyber Range is platform designed to help organisations improve their security capabilities to ensure that they are adequately prepared for cyber attacks in networks created in a virtual environment. Cyber Range has three critical services: practice, validation and experimentation. As a training platform, it aims at developing skills to defend systems and organizations against cyber-attacks. It also reproduces/simulates information and industrial systems from the simplest to the most complicated, in order to analyse their resistance to attacks. It is also a useful tool for evaluating security products and solutions in terms of cyber security.

At KINDI Computing Research Center we are using Cyber Range for training and evaluation of research ideas. We organise Capture-the-Flag (CtF) competitions where competitors use their skills to compete in identifying hidden flags in scenarios of vulnerable programs or websites created in Cyber Range. Our CtFs are designed to serve as an educational exercise to give participants experience in securing systems, conducting and reacting to the type of attacks found in the real world. Examples of the activities undertaken by CtF participants include reverse-engineering, network sniffing, protocol analysis, system administration, programming, crypto analysis, and writing exploits. We are also leveraging the features of Cyber Range to create network system configurations which we use to evaluate the effectiveness of the latest ideas coming out of our cyber security research.

KINDI has suitable lab space for both individual researchers and research team work. We have individual desk space for researchers work by themselves and round table for open discussion. The round table allows for ease of sharing ideas between different researchers as it provides a conducive space to easily start conversations about the latest ideas they are working on to with other researchers over a cup of tea/coffee. For research meetings that require an enclosed space, we have a well-equipped meeting room that give a research team a good space for conducting meeting with little disturbance from external noise. Our meeting room has a high-quality display for sharing presentations with other team members during meetings.

KINDI also has specialized, state-of-the-art servers which researchers use for experiments in different research ideas. For example, for those working on machine learning, we have machines equipped with GPUs which are very useful for speeding-up the process of creating models from data. For cyber security researchers we have the Cyber Range, where they can create different network topologies to experiment with the latest cyber defense ideas that KINDI researchers are currently working on.