Pronounced ice-age. It is an acronym for Internet-Scale Attack and Generation Environment. It is a testbed that creates a virtual Internet for researching, designing and testing cyber defense mechanisms, as well as analyzing cyber attacks. It allows real attacks to be played out without worries and can represent any IP address space. In addition to address space mapping, it also has tools to generate background traffic and background attacks. It has an air gap proxy server through which students can connect to the Internet to download patches or to research information about anomalies, but only traffic on port 80 is allowed. Work is underway for a version of the ISEAGE testbed that is implemented in software and can be exported for others to use.
Published in Chapter:
Cyber Defense Competitions as Learning Tools: Serious Applications for Information Warfare Games
Julie A. Rursch (Iowa State University, USA) and Doug Jacobson (Iowa State University, USA)
Copyright: © 2012
|Pages: 18
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-0149-9.ch004
Abstract
In a cyber defense competition, students design, configure, and maintain a set of servers and a network in a secure manner. The students’ goal during the competition is to prevent security breaches and to remediate any exploits that occur while maintaining a fully functional network for their end users. Cyber defense competitions provide active student learning, mimic real-world situations, and provide engagement with computer and network security topics. To date, Iowa State University has hosted 18 cyber defense competitions across four divisions: high school students, community college students, ISU students, and four-year university students from across the nation. This chapter provides a brief history of cyber defense competitions, as well as describes how they are run. The authors also address the needs of different audiences who participate in cyber defense competitions and show that beyond building and strengthening computer and network security skills, cyber defense competitions can be used for recruitment, retention, advanced training, and experimentation for students.