OpenLabs Security Laboratory - The Online Security Experiment Platform

For experiments to be reproducible, it is important to have a known and controlled environment. This requires isolation from the surroundings. For security experiments, e.g. with hostile software, this is even more important as the experiment can affect the environment in adverse ways. In a normal campus laboratory, isolation can be achieved by network separation. For an online environment, where remote access is essential, full separation is not possible, and therefore the security implications must be carefully considered. In this paper, a way to enable remote experiments is described, where users are given full control over the computer installation. Automating the install procedure and dynamically creating isolated experiment networks provide remote users with the tools needed to do experiments in a reproducible and secure environment. The installation is done by automatically installing prepared clone images, which contains a hard drive representation, to the machines own hard drive. When an experiment starts, the machines in the experiment are automatically booted and placed on an isolated (switched) network. This way experiments are isolated from each other. By using firewall techniques, connections from outside the laboratory can only be made from the user’s machine into his/her experiment. When an experiment is done, all data are erased from the machine’s hard drive.