System Security Evaluation Testbed (Kernel)

Project Summary

This project is developing a simulation kernel tailored for use in evaluating the security of networks, and the organizations that use them. It involves, in particular, the creation of foundational services to aid the development of network simulation models which are used to emulate the impact of cyber-attack upon the modeled network.

The project succeeded in what it set out to do - provide a testbed for detailed simulated cyber-attacks for use in exercises and for analysis. In the end we shifted the kind of exercise of interest, increasing support for analytic simulations, while focusing less on the area of support for integrating RINSE into HLA/RTI and making it highly resilient to hardware and communication failures.

The project lives on in the NSF Cyber-trust center at UIUC. Its exercise abilities are being expanded with greater emphasis on integration of real clients, servers, and intruders. Its analytic abilities are being expanded with additional modeling of protocols, defenses, and traffic that is characteristic of PCS SCADA systems. In the long term we see it being used as part of a control system itself, rapidly emulating the effects of dynamic and automatically determined configuration decisions.

• Project Lead: David Nicol