Very Large Scale Cooperative Experiments in Emulab-Derived Systems

Cyber-defense research has been severely limited by the lack of an experimental infrastructure for testing new theories and new technologies in realistic scenarios. Current testbeds are mostly smallscale and limited to small numbers of machines. The cyber DEfense Technology Experimental Research (DETER) testbed, provides a medium-scale test environment with more than 300 nodes. However, there is increasing interest in running experiments at very large scale with more than 1,000 nodes. This paper describes how experiments can be federated across existing smalland medium-scale testbeds using the University of Utah’s Emulab software, such as the DETER testbed, to enable the running of massive-scale experiments. We describe the Emulab software and the DETER testbed and we detail the necessary steps for running a federated experiment. We provide a status update on our progress and discuss how a manually configured proof-of-concept experiment could be performed.