ECE 6570 Telecomm Security Protocols GWU Spring 2011

ECE 250 Telecomm Security using OpenSim Summer 2010

ECE289 APIs: Rackspace, OpenSim, FreeSwitch, IRC Spring 2010

Finishing up the Forensics Lab

Following the blueprint from “Building a Digital Forensic Laboratory: Establishing and Managing a Successful Facility” by Andrew Jones, Craig Valli, we have created a Virtual Forensics Sim.   The Sim focuses on role-based learning with interactive use-case scenarios.  

We are planning to have a Virtual Forensics Program (VFP) online by third quarter 2010.

Virtual World Court House

eceCloud opens up their Ashburn Campus for beta testing

Ashburn Virtual Campus in the Cloud

In preparation for the ECE289 class starting Jan 9 ’10, eceCloud provides limited beta testing access to the OpenSim Ashburn campus starting Monday December 7, 2009 to GWU students.

This virtual campus combines augmented reality while on campus, with virtual worlds when away from campus, and is supported by on-demand cloud computing facilities.

This solution allows GWU students to meet their academic requirements, while also supporting their social and computational needs in the academic context.

The virtual campus is currently supported by two separate clouds, rackspace cloud and Amazon’s EC2 cloud, running Windows 2003 and Ubuntu servers.

The virtual Ashburn campus building currently houses the eceCloud virtual student lab, and it can scale to house several additional university labs.

virtual student lab

The  gwVM will host the student’s VNC environments which they can access via the Virtual World.  I have seen some nice things online with sharing desktops, but for this go we will bring the desktops up via the web.  I do like the desktop on the prim approach where you can share you desktop with other folks in world.   Adds a new spin on shoulder surfing.

When working with protocols it is nice to have two different machines on different networks, so that you can watch the traffic leave and enter your network cards.  When you are testing on one machine you end up using the loopback interface which is lacking.

In virtual student lab each student will have two desktops connect to VMs in different clouds.  We just need to check that wireshark works properly in each environment.  I like to have this running by this Friday.

now let’s bring amazon into the fold

We now got our windows 2003 server up and running in Amazon’s EC2 cloud. Patching it right now. So just because you are in the cloud it does not mean that you do not have to worry about patching.  Amazon seems a lot more robust than Rackspace.  Looks like you can create your own VW and upload I to Amazon’s EC2.

Next thing is to get the Virtual World to communicate with the new Amazon’s cloud.  So our new deadline is to have the latest snapshot of the virtual world up and running in both the Amazon and Rackspace cloud.  I have have to setup a log server for the entire Virtual World.  Thinking about putting that into a third cloud.

Testing the waters with RackSpace

For the past 35 days we have two rackspace VMs up and running, and last night we just mapped eceCloud.com url to one of them.  Still need to track down the database for the latest ece250 virtual world, so we can port it to the cloud.  So far, I have been happy with support and performance of the RackSpaace cloud.  They did have an outage November 3, 2009, but lucky we were not testing anything at that time.  We installed database on eceCloud.com and imported a virtual environment we did just over a year ago.  I am hoping that we have everything up and running by December 01, so we can start capturing performance metrics vs the cost of the cloud.  I am guessing we can map gwCloud.com to the second VM.

Getting ready for ECE289

I am honored and very excited to be teaching ECE 289 Telecommunication Security Protocols at GWU this coming spring semester 2010.  I generally teach theme based classes, and this spring will be no different.  We are going to dive deep into Cloud Computing and focus on security aspects of it.  I agree that “Cloud Computing” is a loaded and overused term, but security professionals do need to know the ins and outs of all the latest fads.  There is a good chance that we will be asked to secure our company’s application/data/infrastructure after they have been ported to a cloud, and this class will present associated security challenges.

We will be porting the system built during the ECE250 Telecommunications Security Class in summer of ’09, the “Cyber Security Virtual World”, that consisted of built and tested applications, data, and infrastructure.  The system consisted of two database severs, two web servers, one voice server, and five virtual sim servers.  We will install portions of this system into various public clouds, such as, Amazon and RackSpace, and our own private cloud.  Yes, the students will be expected to design, build, and secure their own private cloud computing systems which will connect to a public cloud to create a hybird cloud system for the class.

We should have a lot of fun with this class, and learn about cloud computing and secure protocols this spring.  I am planning to keep the blog going throughout the class, so the previous students get a chance to see how the current class piggy-backs off their hard work.  Also, once we get the “Cyber Security Virtual World” running in the cloud, we will open it back up to GWU students.