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The U.S. Cyber Range platform has two primary components. The Exercise Area provides infrastructure for hands-on cybersecurity education and the Courseware Repository provides teaching materials to support high school and college faculty.
The U.S. Cyber Range hosts isolated virtual networks where students can practice what they learn in immersive, hands-on laboratory exercises to complement their cybersecurity courses.
Students interact with virtual desktops of cloud-hosted virtual machines directly in a tab on their HTML5-compliant browser. No special hardware, software, or browser plugins are required; students just need a web browser and a connection to the internet.
The U.S. Cyber Range creates instances of our cyber range infrastructure for customer organizations. With administrative access to their own instance of our cyber range, schools are able to create accounts for educators within their organization. Educators can then create courses, enroll students, and provision virtual infrastructure without relying on our team to deploy student VMs for them. The exercise area is white-labeled, so schools can brand the exercise area with their own school logo.
Our cyber range infrastructure provides significant resource savings. It replaces the need for schools to purchase hardware and software and employ personnel to install, operate, secure, and maintain those systems. The cloud-based infrastructure allows us to meet increasing resource demands and provide efficiencies that an on-premises computer lab cannot.
Our cloud-based approach allows fast deployment and scalability. We can meet increasing resource demands and provide efficiencies that an on-premises computer lab cannot.
Students interact with virtual desktops of cloud-hosted virtual machines directly in a tab on their HTML5-compliant browser. No special hardware, software, or browser plugins are required; students just need a web browser and a connection to the internet.
The exercise area is white-labeled, so schools can brand the exercise area with their own school or organization logo.
A variety of different virtual environments are available for deployment, representing various network topologies and virtual devices such as Windows and Linux virtual machines. A Capture-the-Flag (CTF) platform is included in the catalog of deployable exercise environments and can be used by educators to provide a competitive, gamified environment for cyber education.
We want our platform to be usable by all students. We strive to make the U.S. Cyber Range compliant with Web Accessibility Compliance Guidelines (WCAG), version 2.1. Please contact us for a copy of our most recent Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT).
Instructors have the option of adding a “persistent” or “non-persistent” environment feature while provisioning environments. Persistent environments retain changes and data across sessions, while non-persistent environments reset to their original state after each session.
With our platform, your IT team doesn’t have to worry about what students are doing. They are not on the school network, they are in our network, in the cloud. Our exercise environments are isolated from each other, and from the internet. Students cannot “hack” or otherwise interfere with internet systems from their virtual environments. Their world-wide web access is carefully controlled using a proxy to prevent them from getting to unsafe or inappropriate websites.
We offer organizations the option to generate anonymous credentials for users in their courses. This allows instructors to maintain the anonymity of their students while using our platform. This is particularly helpful for organizations that must adhere to student data requirements.
Content is divided into modules, each containing a few lessons. Educators can easily incorporate content into existing courses, or create an entire course from modules they select.
Our courseware is shared using a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC) that allows users to remix, adapt, and build upon it non-commercially, as long as it is attributed to the source (the U.S. Cyber Range).
All of our content is provided as Microsoft Word or Powerpoint documents that educators can modify to suit their student population.
Our courseware is developed by experienced educators at the university, college, and high school levels in collaboration with our expert content coordinators.
Formats are consistent across lessons, courses, and modules and are designed to be easily modified to match other courseware used by high school and college educators.
The U.S. Cyber Range hosts isolated virtual networks where students can practice what they learn in immersive, hands-on laboratory exercises to complement their cybersecurity courses.
This laboratory exercise gives students hands-on experience with password strength analysis using command-line tools in Linux.
This laboratory exercise provides students with hands-on experience with a web application exploit known as SQL injection. SQL injection takes advantage of web application flaws that might let a user maliciously expose, and even manipulate, a web application’s back-end database.
Students are introduced to Wireshark, a widely-used network packet analyzer. In this exercise, students will analyze packet capture files, and also learn how to capture live network traffic in real-time.