The science of cyber security experimentation: the DETER project

Abstract

Since 2004, the DETER Cyber-security Project has worked to create an evolving infrastructure - facilities, tools, and processes - to provide a national resource for experimentation in cyber security. Building on our insights into requirements for cyber science and on lessons learned through 8 years of operation, we have made several transformative advances towards creating the next generation of DeterLab. These advances in experiment design and research methodology are yielding progressive improvements not only in experiment scale, complexity, diversity, and repeatability, but also in the ability of researchers to leverage prior experimental efforts of other researchers in the DeterLab user community. This paper describes the advances resulting in a new experimentation science and a transformed facility for cybersecurity research development and evaluation.