Tele-Lab IT-Security: an Architecture for an online virtual IT Security Lab

Abstract

Recently, Awareness Creation in terms of IT security has become a big thing â?? not only for enterprises. Campaigns for pupils try to highlight the importance of IT security even in the userâ??s early years. Common practices in security education â?? as seen in computer science courses at universities â?? mainly consist of literature and lecturing. In the best case, the teaching facility offers practical courses in a dedicated isolated computer lab. Additionally, there are some more or less interactive e-learning applications around. Most existing offers can do nothing more than impart theoretical knowledge or basic information. They all lack of possibilities to provide practical experience with security software or even hacker tools in a realistic environment. The only exceptions are the expensive and hard-to-maintain dedicated computer security labs. Those can only be provided by very few organizations. Tele-Lab IT-Security was designed to offer hands-on experience exercises in IT security without the need of additional hardware or maintenance expenses. The existing implementation of Tele-Lab even provides access to the learning environment over the Internet â?? and thus can be used anytime and anywhere. The present paper describes the extended architecture on which the current version of the Tele-Lab server is built.