Cyber Range Infrastructure Limitations and Needs of Tomorrow: A Position Paper

Cyber networks are extremely non-deterministic, complex systems. To address this, we must develop foundational research protocols to enable reproducible cyber experiments that can systematically uncover deep understanding of a cyber system's security posture. One core tenant of this approach is to have a test environment to enable a space to create and test hypotheses about systems and reason about results. To date, this has generally been done through cyber testbeds or cyber ranges. National infrastructure supported by various government agencies have all created multi-million dollar ranges, and support other national infrastructure such as the National Cyber Range (NCR) and the Regional Service Delivery Points (RSDP). The thrust of this paper was based on multi-year studies, the culmination of which uncovered gaps and challenges associated with using various national infrastructures to represent a multitude of complex heterogeneous systems. Ranges, such as the NCR, have experiment life-cycle processes to take a cyber experiment from inception to analysis. However, our position is that processes used are not sufficient to address gaps and challenges. In this position paper, we review current range experiment methodologies and our observations of other considerations that should require inclusion.

I. Introduction

Cyber security cannot be classified under a formal branch of science, such as physics or chemistry. Cyber security is essentially informed by the mathematical constructs of computer science, to include automata, complexity, and mathematical logic. However, unlike physics, cyber security depends on implementation correctness at the hands of developers and users, whose minuscule errors may result in disproportionate impacts on the security of the system itself. These challenges cause significant non-determinism in the system under study. To address this, practitioners must create foundational research protocols to enable reproducible cyber experiments that can systematically uncover deep understanding of a system's security posture. One core tenant of this approach is to have a test environment that enables a space to hypothesize about systems, execute experiments and observe or reason about the results. To date this has been done through numerous cyber testbeds or cyber ranges. E.g., national infrastructure supported by the DoD (US Cyber Command, Department of Test and Evaluation, Test Resource Management Center) have all created multi-million dollar ranges and support other national infrastructure such as the National Cyber Range (NCR) and the Regional Service Delivery Points (RSDP).