�鶹APP

Having access to a safe space to practice cybersecurity skills that students learn in the classroom is an integral asset needed to master the know-how to succeed in the field, and a group of Illinois Tech students recently built a cyber range web application to help in that endeavor.

Students log into the cyber range to find a variety of tests, including capture the flag, penetration testing, and other hacking scenarios. These tests are designed to enhance their cybersecurity skills and knowledge. Each test launches its own set of prepared virtual machines that are separated by a software-defined network.

“This will enable professors access to a wide variety of labs,” says Ivan Zziwa (ITM, M.A.S. ITM 2nd Year). “This cyber range will enhance the academic experience for both professors and students.”

A $120,000 price tag often prevents the purchase of a cyber range, and additional costs, such as finding servers to host the range, drive the cost higher. But by building the range themselves and hosting it on local servers run by the Department of Information Technology and Management, the student team was able to get a cyber range up and running with minimal costs.

Operating a cyber range means that there is generation of sensitive information that needs to be secured, such as user passwords. Anthoinette Ilolo (ITM, M.A.S. ITM 2nd Year) was charged with developing the Vault, a centralized control for this sensitive information that reduces risk from exposure due to hardcoding, mismanagement, and breaches.

She says that her coursework prepared her well to participate in the cyber range project and to develop the Vault, specifically.

And Ilolo is grateful for the opportunity to spend a semester working on the cyber range.

“There’s only so much that you learn in the classroom. You have to know how to apply what you’ve learned,” she says. “This is the real deal. This is meat on the bone.”

Aditya Waghmare (ITM, M.A.S. ITM 2nd Year) agrees, adding that working on the cyber range has given him the opportunity to test his skills.

“Knowledge from the classroom is not enough,” he says. “You have to be able to use that knowledge in the real world.”

The team, which includes alum Jacon Holtz (M.A.S. ITM ’24) elected to put the cyber range on a cloud platform in order to isolate the virtual machines that run the tests, which cannot be done on a local system. Waghmare took the reins to develop the network that isolates the virtual machines using a software-defined network infrastructure. This allowed the team to build virtual machines on the network without allowing them to talk to each other, which means students using the range can expect to run their tests without interference from other users.

“We were able to do it using all Illinois Tech infrastructure,” Waghmare says. “It’s not on [Amazon Web Services] or some other server.”

Although the team successfully built a cyber range, it still needs some improvements such as building more virtual machines more quickly, reducing interruptions, improving user experience, and bringing it to a scale that allows more students and faculty to use it.

“We’ve proved that it works,” Zziwa says. “We’ve used it, and we’re hoping to get it in a centralized environment. The focus now is gaining new skills instead of deploying the labs.”

Photo: (From left to right) Aditya Waghmare, Anthoinette Ilolo, and Ivan Zziwa.