A Novel Hybrid Cyber Range for Security Exercises on Cyber-Physical Systems

Incident response teams cannot prepare for every situation or predict every crisis, especially when they involve cyber-physical systems. As a result, training activities need to be provided to support operating in challenging situations to develop concrete guidance, procedures, and tools to help individuals collectively react in different, unpredictable situations. Experiential learning is a training technique based on the assumed importance of experimenting and involvement, proposing that active engagement in a scenario develops personal experiences that form the basis of understanding. Exercises are a form of serious games that are a proven method of delivering experiential learning. This article presents CYRAN, a realistic environment used for cyber warfare training, cyber resiliency testing, and cyber technology development. CYRAN is a low-cost cyber range that can be easily used for experiments on realistic scenarios for various educational and training purposes and for the collection of labelled datasets for further research.