V-Lab: A Mobile Virtual Lab for Network Security Studies

Abstract

Virtual Laboratories has been accomplished as an economic support in educational institutions. Using emerging technology such as cloud computing and rapid development in the mobile operating system and mobile applications Virtual laboratories are becoming popular in the educational as well as in business organizations. Time and place are major constraints on the learning system. By taking facilities provided by M-learning technology learners and researchers are able to perform their learning task very efficiently and well organized way. In this paper a brand new implementation architecture is provided for developers those who are interested to develop a virtual laboratories. Mobile phones are used as a front end for GUI. XEN Cloud Platform (XCP) and OpenStack both are open source are used to create virtual laboratories. By using java API's application developers are able to create virtual laboratories for android phones. This paper is mainly focused on network security experiments which require highly available, reliable, flexible, re-configurable and isolated laboratories for performing network security experiments as an academic course or research purpose. Creating large number of cluster of Xen Servers we are able to run multiple VMs which can be used as router, switch, host, DHCP server, FTP Server, firewall etc. and using OpenStack virtualization technique we can create a network, configure a network as per our requirement by using android phone as a user interface.