V-NetLab: A Cost-Effective Platform to Support Course Projects in Computer Security

Network and computer courses need dedicated laboratories for students to carry out hands-on assignments and course projects. Typically, these projects require each student to be given administrative access to an entire, isolated network of computers. The obvious approach of creating one dedicated physical network for each student is prohibitively expensive, both in terms of hardware costs, as well as the management overhead in setting up and administering these networks. We have therefore developed a platform where logically isolated virtual networks of computers can be set up very easily. The platform greatly simplifies administration of virtual networks by automating the startup and shutdown of these networks. In addition, our platform simplifies customization of the configurations of different computers on a virtual network, and moreover, provides features to permute these configurations across different student groups. A novelty of our approach is that these networks are realized on a modest size physical networks consisting of commodity PCs. In our experiments to date, classes of 50 students have been supported with a hardware platform costing under $30K, where each student has access to a dedicated, logical network of 6 to 8 (virtual) computers.