Using a virtual laboratory environment for penetration-testing skills training

Abstract

This paper describes the virtual laboratory environment developed by the authors for training penetration-testing skills with justification of the design decisions, as well as the results of the study of the applicability of the developed virtual laboratory environment for teaching penetration-testing skills in the educational process of bachelor's degree in information security program. It has been shown that a virtual lab environment for training penetration-testing skills can be implemented using open source software. The implemented software environment makes rather moderate requirements to the hardware platform (specified in the paper) on which it should be executed. The study of applicability has shown that the developed virtual laboratory environment can be used in the educational process of bachelor's degree in information security program with the use of distance learning technologies and allows students to develop practical skills in using penetration testing methods on examples of objects of various levels of complexity.

Keywords

• virtual laboratory environment, penetration-testing skills, information security, distance learning.