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Design and Implementation of a Research and Education Cybersecurity Operations Center

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Cybersecurity and Secure Information Systems

Abstract

The growing number and severity of cybersecurity threats, combined with a shortage of skilled security analysts, has led to an increased focus on cybersecurity research and education. In this article, we describe the design and implementation of an education and research Security Operations Center (SOC) to address these issues. The design of a SOC to meet educational goals as well as perform cloud security research is presented, including a discussion of SOC components created by our lab, including honeypots, visualization tools, and a lightweight cloud security dashboard with autonomic orchestration. Experimental results of the honeypot project are provided, including analysis of SSH brute force attacks (aggregate data over time, attack duration, and identification of well-known botnets), geolocation and attack pattern visualization, and autonomic frameworks based on the observe, orient, decide, act methodology. Directions for future work are also be discussed.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the support of Marist College and the New York State Cloud Computing and Analytic Center (CCAC), as well as support from the National Science Foundation under CC*DNI Integration (Area 4): Application-Aware Software-Defined Networks for Secure Cloud Services (SecureCloud) Award #1541384. We also gratefully acknowledge the support of Marist College IT staff and students in creating the SOC, including Bill Thirsk (former Marist CIO), Harry Williams (Marist CSO), Eric Weeda (former Marist IT staff), Roger Norton (Dean of the School of Computer Science and Mathematics) and Marist undergraduate students V. Joseph, P. Liengtiraphan, G. Leaden, T. Famularo, T. Magnusson, and M. Zimmermann.

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DeCusatis, C., Cannistra, R., Labouseur, A., Johnson, M. (2019). Design and Implementation of a Research and Education Cybersecurity Operations Center. In: Hassanien, A., Elhoseny, M. (eds) Cybersecurity and Secure Information Systems. Advanced Sciences and Technologies for Security Applications. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16837-7_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16837-7_13

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