Board 128: Understanding Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) and Software-defined Networking (SDN) for Computer Networking and Security Education

Hands-on modules and experiments are considered essential and fundamental components in cyber security curriculums. However, because of the significant increase in student enrollments in both online and face-to-face courses, universities face various challenges mainly related to financial support and computing resources that could be limited. To overcome such key challenges, universities have been considering alternative solutions to solve resource issues and allow students to practice real-world lab experiments through a virtual environment such as the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI). GENI is a real-world, repeatable, programmable, at-scale, virtual infrastructure for experiments in a variety of computer science areas such as networking, security, and distributed computing sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF). Furthermore, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has been a core technology in cloud computing and other cyber-physical systems where SDN facilitates network management and enables network programmability and efficient network configuration to improve network performance, monitoring, and security. In this paper, we will demonstrate our great efforts in the development of GENI and SDN learning and experimental modules for computer networking and security courses in order to achieve the goal of our funded NSF project. Specifically, we will first present our methodology for the design of our modules and then give the detail of GENI and SDN modules including GENI account setup and resource reservation, measurement tool labs, as well as SDN labs for network traffic management and the detection and mitigation of several well-known security attacks, such as Denial of Service Attacks (DoS), Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS), phishing attacks, and Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) malware detection. Those learning and experimental modules have been developed at different levels to meet the need of different types of students. Finally, we will present our assessment and student feedback to demonstrate the efficiency of our developed GENI and SDN modules for networking and security education.