A Container-Based Virtual Laboratory for Internet Security e-Learning

Tele-Lab is a platform for e-learning in Internet security with a special focus on teaching by means of handson experience. A virtual laboratory is implemented for the provision of training environments for practical exercises. Tele-Lab uses virtual machine (VM) technology and virtual network devices. A VM is used to represent a physical computer in an exercise scenario. While every VM needs a specific resource allocation, availability and scalability of Tele-lab become an issue. Scaling out Tele-Lab to a public cloud is one alternative to making it more available and scalable. Public clouds are very flexible in providing resources since customers can add or reduce resources whenever needed. A second alternative is the reduction of resources needed for a single training environment, e.g. by replacing the virtualization technology in Tele-Lab with the one that uses fewer resources than full-fledged virtual machines. A container uses far fewer resources than a virtual machine. The paper at hand elaborates on the use of containers (i.e. Docker) in the training environment of a man in the middle (MITM) attack and Firewall learning units, designed to replace VMs. This work is part of the continuous improvement on Tele-Lab to make it more reliable and more scalable. 