When a testbed does more than testing: The Internet-Scale Event Attack and Generation Environment (ISEAGE) - providing learning and synthesizing experiences for cyber security students.

The importance of laboratory exercises for students is recognized unilaterally by engineering and technology programs. As engineering educators whose academic focus is information assurance and cyber security, we believe students in cyber security need the same type of access to hands on opportunities as their counter parts in hardware design or circuit design. Students should be able to configure and run their own networks, as well as explore the vulnerabilities, exploits, and remediatios needed in a cyber security professional´s tool kit. Further, they need exposure to working in the complexity of the Internet. While some might argue that simulation software could be a solution, it often lacks realism. In this paper we show how our institution goes beyond the providing the standard, formalized laboratory activities for our cyber security students by developing a unique, highly configurable testbed called Internet-Scale Event and Attack Generation Environment (ISEAGE - pronounced “ice age”) that allows us to imitate the Internet. ISEAGE provides a controlled environment that allows real attacks to be played out against the students´ networks and demonstrates to them real world security concepts. This paper provides an overview of how the ISEAGE security testbed functions, as well as illustrates how ISEAGE provides our students five different types of opportunities for real world experience: support of formalized classroom work; cyber defense competitions for high school, community college and four year students; inquiry-based learning in a playground environment for high school, as well as college students; testing environment for network devices such as firewalls, data loss protection, intrusion detection; research environment for senior and graduate student work.