On federated cyber range network interconnection

Cyber Ranges exist to enable hands on training within realistic ICT infrastructures in a sandboxed environment, to investigate attack and defense strategies and to assess the resilience of the infrastructures. To fully exploit their capabilities one has to have access to multi domain exercises, which may combine ICT, naval, electrical grid, telecom or other relevant infrastructures. It can become obvious that no single organization can easily own or sustain a multi domain cyber range and that there is a need to connect multi domain Cyber Ranges from different organizations together. This paper focuses into analyzing the current state of the art on the federation of Cyber Ranges, by focusing on the federated network interconnection. Various methods for interconnecting distributed Cyber Ranges into a single federated Cyber Range are being discussed and their network performance impact is evaluated. VPNs are widely used to interconnect networks together due to their relative low cost and simplistic nature, however, performance of the network must be accounted, alongside the flexibility the VPNs can provide to support multiple scenarios in a multi domain distributed federated Cyber Range. This work focuses on the performance comparison of IPsec and Virtual Tunnels.