-The cost of adequately equipping laboratories with required laboratory equipment has been found to be prohibitively expensive. This has made teaching of practical oriented courses very challenging in educational institutions. Virtualization is a technology that can create the impression of having dedicated hardware resources in place of physical laboratory equipment thereby reducing this prohibitive cost. In this paper, the development of a virtual laboratory using software defined networking approach is presented. The developed system was tested using a network penetration testing laboratory session. The results derived show that the virtual laboratory has the potential of enhancing learning in practical oriented courses because of the ease of conducting practical sessions and the elimination of procurement cost of laboratory equipments.
Virtualization has been used for many years as a solution
in many cooperate settings to ease the daily activities and
provide security to equipment [
In academics, virtualization has helped to reduce the prohibitive cost of setting up a laboratory for teaching practical courses. Heretofore, laboratory equipment have to be purchased and set up for use in the laboratory. Apart from the linear increment in cost as the number of students increase, there is also the issue of space where the equipment will be placed. Furthermore, students need to be physically present in the laboratory to use the equipment. With the use of virtualization, these overheads and more can be eliminated.
An upcoming technology in virtualization known as
Software Defined Networking promises greater flexibility [
In this paper, the development of a virtual laboratory using a software defined networking (SDN) approach is presented. This work was implemented using a cyber security practical session. However, it should be noted that the developed laboratory can be applied in a variegated range of disciplines. The paper is further structured as follows: In section II detailed review of related work is presented. The description of the employed methodology is presented in Section III. The results and discussion is presented in Section IV while Section V concludes the work.
The use of virtualization in the development of virtual laboratories has gained large acceptance in academia due to the high cost of procuring laboratory equipment. A large amount of work has been done in the development of a virtual laboratory for educational purposes. Based on these works, virtual laboratories can be classified into two namely: Centralized and Decentralized structured virtual laboratories.
In the case of the centralized structure, the nodes have
a central server where all remote connections are made in
order to access the laboratory. In [
In Decentralized structure, the nodes operate with no
dependence on a central server. This creates a whole range
of advantages to the virtual laboratory development. The
use of decentralized structure is a trend among education
and professional fields [
Heretofore, virtualization for educational purposes has
been focused mainly on Information Technology (IT) based
courses and subjects. Some of the subjects include computer
networking and cyber security. Advanced computer network
[
Software defined networking being an upcoming concept involves the abstraction of the network functionalities. The implication of this is that the network becomes more efficient and flexible in maintenance. This section expounds on the methods used in developing the SDN based virtual laboratory.
The layered model show in Fig. 1 was employed in the development of the virtual laboratory.
Control layer defines how the network handles a given packet. Infrastructure layer involves the use of a physical or virtual network device. Application layer involves the kinds of high layer functionality expected on the network. It involves the virtualization of a designed network.
In order to develop the system, two tools; VMWare and GNS3; were employed. The application layer resides on the VMWare while the control and infrastructure layers reside on the GNS3 platform. The network is set up on the GNS3 emulator and it is used to interface the application on the VMware platform.
A personal computer running windows 7 was used as the Host Computer (HC). On the HC, VMware workstation 11 was installed to be used to create Virtual Machines for the developed Virtual Laboratory. The overview of the developed system is further depicted in Fig. 2 1) VIRTUAL LABORATORY: This block represents the various laboratory practical sessions taken in the laboratory. For the purpose of this research, a network penetration laboratory session is implemented in the laboratory. This block will reside on the VMWare platform. Course Instructor simply modifies this to accommodate the required laboratory session.
2) VIRTUAL NETWORK: This block enables remote connection between the user and the laboratory. Various modules of the laboratory are connected together using this block. A user is further required to remotely log into laboratory to be granted access. GNS3 network emulator is used to implement this functionality in the design.
3) COMPUTER: It is from this unit that the user connects to the laboratory. A secured login encryption is enabled using SSH to eliminate possible eavesdropping on the provided password.
From Fig. 3, the instructor can set up all the virtual machines for the SDN. The administrator is responsible for creating virtual machines when needed, installing new software or services on the virtual machine for the purpose of laboratory practical.
The students of the system can perform the set laboratory tasks. A remote connection is required to access the laboratory platform. Once login has been established, users can now carry out various penetration tests on the VM instance that has been created.
The system was tested by implementing a Penetration Testing Lab. The details of the tests conducted are presented as follows.
Zenmap, a GUI scanning tool is used to scan the internal and external networks which are 10.10.10.1/24 and 192.168.10.1/24 respectively. The results of the scanning are shown in Fig. 5
A single quote (‘) or ‘or 1 = 1 – was submitted to the webserver to test for SQL injection vulnerability. An error being generated afterwards indicates the presence of such vulnerability as shown in Fig. 6
Burpsuite proxy is used to intercept the request and the request is sent to SQLMAP, a database exploitation tool. To run burpsuite, “burpsuite &” command is sent to the shell. On default, burpsuite intercepts the request sent to the database and it is saved in a file. All request information saved in sqlitest.txt will be used by sqlmap to exploit the database. The process of exploitation is shown in Fig. 7.
A virtual laboratory was designed, implemented and tested using virtualization and SDN technologies. It was designed using GNS3 and VMware workstation. Network penetration test was conducted to determine the efficiency of the developed system. It can be concluded from the results that the virtual laboratory has the potential of enhancing learning in practical oriented courses because of the ease of conducting practical sessions and the elimination of procurement cost of laboratory equipments.