The InSpiRe lab is located within the research facilities of the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Victoria. Its focus is on addressing systems-level security/privacy and distributed systems issues within large-scale IT systems and networks. To support this work a state of the art $500+k Cyber-security/privacy and distributed systems research test bed is being constructed.
This facility is designed to allow for the exact re-instantiation of the real-time network traffic environments existing within corporate-scale networks, under the rigorous scientific constraints of experimental control and repeatability.
The facility’s principal design is to support the capability of exactly mirroring in, and then automatically executing, cyber-security experiments on an on-demand basis, inclusive of:
- All system OSes.
- All network switch configurations.
- All background network traffic events (either through re-playing recorder traffic traces or through generating traffic which meets statistical models).
- All overlaid attack and normal traffic events.
In this way, the facility will support research into assessing the robustness and sensitivity of various existing and proposed security/distributed systems approaches under real-world conditions. This capability is being enabled through the development of custom experiment control and management software.
Achieving this ability to exactly re-instantiate at-scale experiments is critical if the research results are to be real-world applicable.
©2003 – 20127 Information Security and Privacy Research (InSPiRe) Laboratory,
University of Victoria