An Open-Source Cloud Testbed for Security Experimentation

The use of container and orchestration technologies, such as Docker and Kubernetes keeps growing every year. For the purpose of security experimentation and reproducibility of security attacks and defenses, an open-source testbed would also be an important step forward. Yet, while several security experimentation testbeds from web application testing to capture-the-flag (CTF) competitions have been proposed, a similar solution for cloud experiments is wanting. To fill this gap, we propose an open-source cloud testbed that, by using Domain Specific Language (DSL) files (e.g. with JSON or YAML syntax), allows defining experimentation scenarios as configuration files. Using DSL files allows to create, share, customize, automatically deploy, and reproduce different scenarios in a user-friendly manner. We describe the design and the corresponding tools and technologies for different implementations.