Cyber Test Beds for The Simulation and Modeling of Cyber War Games

Abstract

Cyber space is considered as the fifth domain of warfare. Recently cyber space has evolved in to a war zone worldwide due to which it has become an important aspect for the military and government. As a matter of fact these days more and more data is present online and the conventional ways of maintaining records and storing data have been ruled out. Due to enormous data present online all the countries worldwide are taking measures to secure their data uploaded on internet. Besides, every country is preparing its own cyber army with specialized skills to defend their cyber borders. This thesis tends to investigate the methods used to train cyber army. Cyber war games as one of the most important training method have been highlighted. The thesis focuses on the simulation of war games using cyber test beds as an important platform. Since various methods are used by attackers we will consider the latest technique of attacking enemy cyber space with malwares. We will focus on how to train the army on malware defense/ reverse engineering rather than attacking. Malware Reverse engineering is an important area in information security to know the mechanics and working of malwares to detect, prevent and analyze the malware attacks. We have build a prototype for developing war games by proposing our own methodology that will help in future for simulation the of more advanced war games. In order to propose the methodology for developing war games the first step is to identify different elements of war games. The relationship between the war games and test beds have been well developed in this thesis and test beds have been considered as a basic building block for creating a war game. Moreover we have proposed model for war games. The model has been developed according to the latest trends of malware reverse engineering. The game architecture and functioning is decided for the purpose of teaching the malware reverse engineering techniques in the academia and research and to provide better ways of training on malware defense with best utilization of resources. It is found that the proposed game model is helpful in many ways with the respect to war games and malware analysis. Finally in the end the framework has been proposed for the design of cyber test beds on malware defense.