What is it?

Ahead of a move to Temple Quarter and to enable collaborative working to continue, BCSG, with the support of BDFI and the Faculty of Engineering, have installed a state-of-the-art Cyber Range in their current facilities in the Merchant Venturer’s Building. The Cyber Range - a cyber security training and testing facility to scale up the current experimental front-end within the testbed - consists of servers and networking equipment to host virtual machines, and all the required software both for managing the Range, as well as software such as network simulators and traffic generators.

Why is it special?

The aim of this facility will be to enable a more realistic environment for modelling cyber attacks and countermeasures at-scale, evaluating human responses to real-scale incidents (through a link to BCSG’s Security Operations Centre (SOC) - a physical front-end to the Cyber Range), and linking up with other facilities (both academic and industry) – for example: in the Research Hub the Reality Emulator and Instrumented Auditorium could be linked directly to the Cyber Range providing an extension to the digital twin and content producing capacity of both, and enhanced accessibility.

How does it work?

The Cyber Range is located within the existing BCSG labs in the Merchant Venturers Building in a dedicated server room, and can be accessed both locally and remotely (via VPN). The Range allows us to cater for multi-tenanted experimentation at-scale – something currently very difficult to achieve for the cyber security of industrial infrastructures - through being able to replicate large environments with complicated inter-connectivity, diverse equipment and the growing convergence of IT, IoT and critical national infrastructures. It combines both the ability to virtualise as well as connect to the physical equipment housed in BCSG’s testbed facility.

What difference does it make?

The addition of a commercial Cyber Range to BCSG’s existing testbed provides a key missing component as the testbed moves from being used for localised experimentation to a more federated, inter-institution facility underpinning collaborative research between academics and industry partners. By substantially expanding the scope and scale of the facility we are able to undertake experimentation at a more realistic industrial scale, providing assurances that experimentation has validity to industry environments.

Get involved.

BCSG are in active pursuit of collaborations and partnerships that harness the capacity of their testbed and the Cyber Range and welcome discussions. Get in touch directly via the BCSG Enquiries Mailbox or via the BDFI Team at bdfi-enquiries@bristol.ac.uk.