Projects / Research Papers

This page contains a list of research papers that have been written about the Merge testbed platform and its various components.

Merge/Space: A Security Testbed for Satellite Systems

M. Patrick Collins, J.P. Walters, Calvin Ardi, Chris Tran, Stephen Schwab. Merge/Space: A Security Testbed for Satellite Systems. Proceedings of the Workshop on the Security of Space and Satellite Systems (SpaceSec ‘24), San Diego, CA, USA.

@inproceedings{Collins24a,
  author = {Collins, M. Patrick and Walters, J.P., and Ardi, Calvin and Tran, Chris and Schwab, Stephen},
  title = {Merge/Space: A Security Testbed for Satellite Systems},
  year = {2024},
  booktitle = {Workshop on the Security of Space and Satellite Systems},
  location = {San Diego, CA, USA},
  series = {SpaceSec 2024}
}

The DComp Testbed

Ryan Goodfellow, Stephen Schwab, Erik Kline, Lincoln Thurlow, and Geoff Lawler. 2019. The DComp Testbed. In Cyber Security Experimentation and Test Workshop (CSET ‘19).

The DComp Testbed effort has built a large-scale testbed, combining customized nodes and commodity switches with modular software to launch the Merge open source testbed ecosystem. Adopting EVPN routing, DCompTB employs a flexible and highly adaptable strategy to provision network emulation and infrastructure services on a per-experiment basis. Leveraging a clean separation of the experiment creation process into realization at the Merge portal and materialization on the DCompTB site, the testbed implementation embraces modularity throughout. This enables a well-defined orchestration system and an array of reusable modular tools to perform all essential functions of the DCompTB. Future work will evaluate the robustness, performance and maintainability of this testbed design as it becomes heavily used by research teams to evaluate opportunistic edge computing prototypes.

PDF Presentation

@inproceedings {238258,
author    = {Ryan Goodfellow and Stephen Schwab and Erik Kline and Lincoln Thurlow and Geoff Lawler},
title     = {The {DComp} Testbed},
booktitle = {12th USENIX Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation
and Test (CSET 19)},
year      = {2019},
address   = {Santa Clara, CA},
url       = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/cset19/presentation/goodfellow},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month     = aug,
}

Sled: System-Loader for Ephemeral Devices

Lincoln Thurlow, Ryan Goodfellow and Stephen Schwab. 2019. Sled: System-Loader for Ephemeral Devices. IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS), 2019, pp. 913-914, DOI: `10.1109/INFCOMW.2019.8845249`.

Imaging an operating system onto a server is an extensive and time consuming process, which commonly taking several minutes to boot. For a testbed administrator, loading an image onto a device is one of the slowest yet most relied upon tasks that a testbed must complete prior to starting an experiment. To minimize wait times for disk loading, as well as to streamline the process of image loading, we introduce Sled, a system-loader for ephemeral devices, that uses warm-booting to quickly image devices. Sled is able to provision a new operating system in under a minute, and is 10 times faster than previous methods of image loading.

DOI PDF Code

@INPROCEEDINGS{8845249,
author    = {Thurlow, Lincoln and Goodfellow, Ryan and Schwab, Stephen},
booktitle = {IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS)},
title     = {Sled: System-Loader for Ephemeral Devices},
year      = 2019,
volume    = {},
number    = {},
pages     = {913-914},
doi       = {10.1109/INFCOMW.2019.8845249}
}

Merge: An Architecture for Interconnected Testbed Ecosystems

Ryan Goodfellow, Lincoln Thurlow, Srivatsan Ravi. 2018. Merge: An Architecture for Interconnected Testbed Ecosystems. arXiv:1810.08260. DOI: `10.48550/ARXIV.1810.08260`.

In the cybersecurity research community, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for merging large numbers of heterogeneous resources and experimentation capabilities from disparate specialized testbeds into integrated experiments. The current landscape for cyber-experimentation is diverse, encompassing many fields including critical infrastructure, enterprise IT, cyber-physical systems, cellular networks, automotive platforms, IoT and industrial control systems. Existing federated testbeds are constricted in design to predefined domains of applicability, lacking the systematic ability to integrate the burgeoning number of heterogeneous devices or tools that enable their effective use for experimentation. We have developed the Merge architecture to dynamically integrate disparate testbeds in a logically centralized way that allows researchers to effectively discover, and use the resources and capabilities provided the by evolving ecosystem of distributed testbeds for the development of rigorous and high-fidelity cybersecurity experiments.