Cyber ranges: survey and perspective

Various cyber attacks occurred frequently. Increasing attention has been being paid to cyber security by many countries. To support research on cybersecurity technologies and to avoid the potential effects of attack and defense exercises and technical verification on real networks and production environments, numerous cyber ranges emerged. As a special type of testbed, cyber ranges provide a real, controllable, and flexible experimental environment that effectively reduce research costs, shorten research cycles, and avoid research risks. Cyber ranges, being important scientific infrastructure and scientific experimental platforms, are highly valued by countries around the world. With the continuous evolution of basic support technologies and computational models, cyber ranges face new problems and challenges. This study introduced the development history, typical classification, and common architectures of cyber ranges. The current research status, core projects, and key technologies of industrial and academic cyber ranges in our country and foreign countries were analyzed and compared. Finally, the study summarized the challenges and difficulties faced by cyber range construction and proposed future research directions on cyber ranges. This work has reference value for conducting research and construction of cyber ranges.