A Web-Based Lightweight Testbed for Supporting Network Security Hands-on Labs

We implement a web-based lightweight testbed that can support multiple virtual networks (VNs) on a single physical network to provide hands-on experience in teaching courses for computer network and security. The testbeds leveraging virtualization are preferred to manage VNs. However, most of the employed techniques are heavyweight. Also, user-friendly access to VNs in a testbed is another important issue. In this work, a testbed is implemented using Linux Containers (LXC), Open vSwitch (OVS), and shellinabox that attempts to address the challenges mentioned above. LXC-based virtualization makes the testbed lightweight. A terminal embedded web-based user interface (UI) is implemented using shellinabox. The web-based UI eliminates extraneous software installation at the user-end to access the VNs and enables the users to access their virtual hosts through a web page. An implementation to automate the creation of VNs with varying topology is also discussed.