Building a Cybersecurity Research and Experimentation Testbed

Cybersecurity is critically important to nations and societies. However, it has proven difficult for cybersecurity researchers to quantitatively and experimentally analyze, compare and validate the effectiveness of various offensive and defensive mechanisms. The Cyber Analysis, Simulation and Experimentation Environment (CASE-V) project is focused on developing a secure, highly available, feature rich and flexible framework and testbed. CASE-V includes two foundational platforms: OpenStack cloud and Hadoop big data. This paper presents the architectural design and implementation of the Version 1 CASE-V testbed which is initially operational with ongoing refinements and enhancements underway. It also describes an Automation and User Interface (UI) framework for the testbed to enhance usability and operational robustness, and its prototype implementation.