ADLES: Specifying, deploying, and sharing hands-on cyber-exercises

Hands-on tutorials and exercises are recognized as an effective means for gaining much needed cybersecurity and communication and information technology skills. These exercises must be performed in dedicated and virtually isolated computing environments or laboratories, most of which make use of virtualization technology. Building, modifying, and deploying the virtual environments that enable hands-on instruction is currently very time consuming. A new complete exercise instance must be deployed and configured for each course or module, tutorial or exercise, and student. In addition, efficient sharing and reuse of hands-on exercises between organizations is currently extremely difficult, unless the computing resources and virtualization environment are also shared. ADLES is a specification language and associated deployment system created to address these issues up-front. ADLES enables: (1) the formal specification of hands-on virtual computing, networking, and cybersecurity exercises, (2) the automated deployment of specified exercises, and (3) the efficient sharing of such exercises and their computing environment. In this article, we describe in detail the ADLES specification language and deployment system. We also demonstrate ADLES capabilities using two case studies: a pentesting tutorial and a cyber defense competition. The ADLES system is open source and available for all educators to use and improve.