# Cyber Ranges and TestBeds for Education, Training, and Research
## 3 Background
* Research (testing implementations including methods, tools, building blocks and systems)
* Training/Education (academia, specialized security courses and cyber-security certifications)
* Exercises/Competitions on Cyber Security (security training by means of cyber security exercises like Capture the Flag or Cyber Defense Exercises). Research demands for environments that are fully controlled and isolated but at the same time complex to develop and test a new tool, or to design new attack techniques or methods. The training serves cybersecurity practice and education. Trainees have the opportunity to practice various cyber range scenarios, according to their specific training needs. The third and maybe most popular category of cyber range use nowadays is for cyber exercises. Here, the users compete in cyber contests, capture the flag competitions, hack the box challenges, and attack/defense games. We can also categorize cyber ranges based on their operator. The main players for the development of Cyber Ranges and similar testbeds have been universities, government agencies, military research centers, international organizations, and their affiliates. Whilethe details of some Cyber Ranges are publicly available, there also exist cyber ranges that are funded by the military and governments throughout the world and their details are eventually classified. Throughout the recent development and widening of the cyber range constituency, the concept of a federation of cyber ranges has emerged. The concept of federation relies on the consideration that a single cyber range would have enormous costs and would be extremely complicated if it was to have all the necessary features and functionalities, the whole package. Therefore, it would be better organized, and also modular and in effect realistic, if multiple cyber ranges, each within a specific area of expertise, could collaborate in order to offer to their users a wide variety of use cases and different scenarios. For example, some cyber ranges simulate social media networks or publicly available internet resources while other cyber ranges may be specialized in simulating industrial control systems or critical infrastructures. The combination of the capabilities of different cyber ranges would result in the development of a much broader simulation environment available for their end-users, while at the same time the overall cost would remain unchanged. Following this concept, several cyber range federation are being developed. Such an example is the Cyber Ranges Federation project which aims at building an EU-wide cyber range. Participants of this federation include eleven EU member states, the European Space Agency (ESA) as well as the European Defence Agency (EDA). Another relevant initiative is the CyberSec4 Europe project which refers to designing, testing and demonstrating potential governance structures for a future European Cybersecurity Competence Network. One more example is the ECHO project (European network of Cybersecurity centers and competence Hub for innovation and Operations) launched by the European Commission with the vision to establish and operate a Cybersecurity Competence Network. The Deployment models of cloud computing are categorized into four commonly used categories. Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Community Cloud and Hybrid Cloud. Additionally, there are three Services models of Cloud Computing: Infrastructure, Software, and Platform as a Service (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS). In the SaaS model, a software provider sells a software application that can be used on-demand. In the IaaS, the provider offers as service computing resources like storage, server or peripherals. The users can have a virtual server in a very short time, and they pay only for the resources they use. The PaaS model represents an abstraction layer between the IaaS and SaaS and its target group includes deployers and developers. Infrastructure platforms and tools include OpenStack [21], Opennebula [22], Proxmox [23], VMware [24], Public cloud (AWS), Minimega [25] and KVM [26].