SOCLAB, vSoC, LinuxZoo, AWS Academy and The Cyber Academy
The subject group has worked in the number of areas of virtualisation in the delivery of cybersecurity teaching. This has included the creation of vSoC - an advanced virtualisation environment for students. vSoC provides a foundation in creating real-life environment that allow students to setup networked systems, and to attack and defend these systems within an isolated environment. Along with this, academics in the Centre developed the Security Operations Centre Lab facility (SOCLab). SOCLab provides a training and teaching facility and incorporates real world security operations (using playbooks), incident response, and many other areas relevant to industry and law enforcement. Current work includes the setup of an AWS (Amazon Web Services) Academy, and which provides skills developments in areas of cloud fundamentals, data engineering, and cloud architecture. These provide core skills related to public cloud systems.
Another area of development is LinuxZoo and which is a unique environment development to provide temporary virtualised infrastructure including servers, networks, and desktop machines on demand to students. Users gain access to a set of virtual computers and networks dedicated to that user, which are built dynamically as required. This is like a hands-on traditional computer lab, where resource is allocated to each user for the duration of a lab session, but here the resource from the user’s viewpoint is completely cloud-based. The system is combined with an integrated learning environment, providing users with exercises for each lab which are assessed automatically by the system, offering the users feedback in real time on their progress and correctness.
The Cyber Academy has run a number of leading conference events over the past few years, including the flagship International Conference in Big Data and Cybersecurity. It has also supported a number of training courses, including with the MASCOTS training programme, and which focused on supporting neurodiverse into careers in Cybersecurity.