Educational Information Security Laboratories : A Literature Review

Educational centers are investigating the feasibility of creating InfoSec laboratory for their students in order to enhance their practical experience. Experiments could be performed in either physical or virtual labs. The advantage of virtual lab compared to physical lab is utilization of minimal components with the aid of hypervisor software. In addition, reverting back computer configuration to original state rapidly, capability of altering resource configuration immediately and managing all virtual machines via a single console are some features that highlighted the use of this technology in the laboratories. Despite the virtual laboratory tremendous advantages, literature lacks a comprehensive review on implemented virtual labs. The purpose of this thesis is to fill this gap by inspecting the implemented virtual labs in education center. Consequently, the thesis outcome would provide an insight to other institutes and researchers to utilize these labs as models to decrease the effort and expenses for implementing InfoSec labs. The offered assignments of these labs would be elaborated in order to provide a sample for execution of these experiments for other researchers in their own environment. Furthermore, comparison of the discovered virtual labs based on availability, maintainability and security would be performed. Finally, a suggested physical layout of virtual lab is being presented. Twelve universities had been scrutinized which are aligned with the thesis goal