NSST. Network Security Simulator Tool_1

Fernando Ureña Carmon; Jesús Esteban Díaz Verdejo

Abstract:

System and networks security is an importance growing area in the information society. Today’s society manifests a genuine dependence on the supporting information systems and technologies. The growth of services provided by the Internet and networks is vertiginous, and this is the reason why the protection of vulnerabilities of the systems that supports these services is a critical issue. The severity and number of attacks to critical infrastructures have only increased. It is necessary to improve the effort on protecting against threats and intrusions and one of the main solutions is to offer quality training in information and systems security. A proper professional training requires employing laboratories environments where the practice of the discipline can be implemented. Nevertheless, the majority of approximations used nowadays are too static and inflexible to be able to give response to the professional training needed in this area. Designing security labs in a realistic way without compromising the network environment they belong is a real challenge. So, this project deals with the design and development of a tool that generates network scenarios simulating real labs which use does not have a negative impact in the real network. A flexible, distributed, modular, scalable, extensible and intuitive tool is presented in this project - NSST (Network Security Simulator Tool), based on the concept of virtualization, in order to generate network scenarios where exercises in security field can be practiced. The software offers the user a simple and stable way of automation of virtual stages generation. It is also based on the idea of portability, a feature that allows users to not only to use it in professional and academic environments, but the possibility of extending its use to personal environments. Considering the scale and evolution of the discipline this project has been created for, it has been implemented as an extensible software base on which new modules can be added easily. For the study of real-time security, it also provides an attack launch scheduler with a nowadays representative set of these attacks.

Research areas:

• Ethical hacking and digital forensics

Year:

2013

Type of Publication:

Master Thesis

Type of Publication:

PFC