Jericho: A Cyber City for Enhancing Cyber Operations Education

Cyber operations create effects in physical space as well as cyberspace, but most cybersecurity education exercises are confined to cyberspace. Jericho helps drive home the real impact of cyber operations and cyber-insecurity by incorporating physical space effects into cyber operations education. Jericho is a physical table-top cyber city that incorporates critical infrastructure elements. It blends a traditional cyber range experience with a physical range. Existing cyber physical ranges are rare and prohibitively expensive. Jericho is a model for how ranges can be constructed inexpensively. It uses off-the-shelf electromechanical components like motors, speakers, and light emitting diodes (LEDs) wired to a microprocessor such as Raspberry Pi Zeros. It models how missions can be created on the range by placing students in the role of cyber operators charged with the attack or defense of critical infrastructure. Students gain access to the cyber city’s network over a VPN and begin their mission in a sandboxed virtual machine environment similar to many cyber education exercises. In one mission, students find and exploit vulnerabilities as they pivot through a mock city’s cyberspace infrastructure with the goal of commandeering the city’s traffic lights. The mission is accomplished when the physical traffic lights in the miniature city change at the will of the students.