National scientific laboratory

Cyber range - a strategic core technology platform

In the new era of the Internet of Everything, the cyber range can simulate the complex network environment in the laboratory, and support the new network technology validation and cyberspace security research in the scenarios of scientific research, industrial control, simulation, drill, and competition. Therefore, the cyber range is of vital importance for cultivating the core technology.

The task of building the world's leading cyber range is assigned to a large national scientific research laboratory. As one of the science and technology centers in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the laboratory has undertaken a number of national scientific research projects. At present, it is carrying out research on the super optical network in the Greater Bay Area, and 5G application demonstration in typical industries. For the construction of the virtual network subsystem, the core part of the cyber range, the laboratory cooperated with H3C (under UNIS), used H3C CAS (cloud automation system) to effectively support the reconstruction of the complex network environment, creating a cyber range with a large scale, a relatively advanced technology and complete functions.

Make a breakthrough in core technologies to quickly build virtual networks

The objective of the scientific research laboratory is to quickly reproduce a high-simulation environment that can replace the real network. A high service standard is formulated for this purpose. According to the plan, the cyber range needs to simulate the environment of at least 50,000 network nodes and deploy 10,000 VMs in an hour. In actual operation, the cyber range also requires the virtual host to run efficiently at delays below 10us, effectively manage more than 100 VM processes running on a unified physical device, and fully understand the network status by means of large-scale collection and efficient distribution of traffic data.

To reach such a high standard, the cyber range is required to be supported by five service subsystems, including the scenario configuration subsystem and the virtual network subsystem (core subsystem). To meet the requirements of the laboratory, H3C Group used H3C CAS virtualization solution, in combination with the distributed storage, SDN, cloud computing management platform and other software and hardware resources, to provide the underlying hardware support platform for the cyber range, realizing the on-demand delivery of basic resources, and accelerating the construction of the automatic network.

In the virtual network subsystems, the operation of each module is driven by data. Based on H3C CAS virtualization solution, H3C Group implements resource pooling and builds the KVM virtualization module, container virtualization module, server virtualization module, and network virtualization module. These modules obtain target resources from the support platform for the unified management and intelligent deduction of big data, so as to realize fast reproduction of ten-thousand-scale target system. In addition, the SDN control module and the NFV control module are called for the end-to-end communication configuration and network virtualization configuration, to support traffic simulation, so that the network traffic of the cyber range is more similar to that of the real user.

Deploy 10,000 VMs in 45 minutes to exceed industry standards

On the basis of stable and reliable services of H3C CAS virtualization solution, H3C Group cooperates with the technical team of the laboratory to optimize and customize the system cloud platform, SDN APIs, and switches of the cyber range, so as to further improve the service capability. The current technical standard of the cyber range is to deploy 10,000 VMs in 2 hours. With H3C CAS virtualization solution, it only takes 45 minutes to deploy 10,000 VMs in the laboratory. This ensures that the related research can be started quickly.

H3C CAS virtualization solution helps the cyber range of the scientific research laboratory realize the goal of constructing a cyber range with 100,000 nodes, support data collection through multiple collection protocols, and achieve fruitful results in advanced fields such as deep threat detection, network security index calculation model construction, and network security situation quantitative evaluation based on the network security knowledge atlas.

In the past 10 years, H3C CAS virtualization solution has achieved a breakthrough in its service capability, providing a solid foundation for digital transformation and cultivation of cutting-edge technology. In the future, H3C Group will further cooperate with scientific research organizations to deeply optimize and customize H3C CAS virtualization solution, and meet the requirements of the R&D of cutting-edge technologies for service resources.