International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 93 – No.20, May 2014 35 V-Lab: A Mobile Virtual Lab for Network Security Studies Yugesh Suresh Bhosale School of computing Science and Engineering VIT University Chennai, Tamilnadu 600 127, INDIA Jenila Livingston L. M., Ph.D Associate Professor School of computing Science and Engineering VIT University Chennai, Tamilnadu 600 127, INDIA ABSTRACT Virtual Laboratories has been accomplished as an economic support in educational institutions. Using emerging technology such as cloud computing and rapid development in the mobile operating system and mobile applications Virtual laboratories are becoming popular in the educational as well as in business organizations. Time and place are major constraints on the learning system. By taking facilities provided by M-learning technology learners and researchers are able to perform their learning task very efficiently and well organized way. In this paper a brand new implementation architecture is provided for developers those who are interested to develop a virtual laboratories. Mobile phones are used as a front end for GUI. XEN Cloud Platform (XCP) and OpenStack both are open source are used to create virtual laboratories. By using java API’s application developers are able to create virtual laboratories for android phones. This paper is mainly focused on network security experiments which require highly available, reliable, flexible, re- configurable and isolated laboratories for performing network security experiments as an academic course or research purpose. Creating large number of cluster of Xen Servers we are able to run multiple VMs which can be used as router, switch, host, DHCP server, FTP Server, firewall etc. and using OpenStack virtualization technique we can create a network, configure a network as per our requirement by using android phone as a user interface. General Terms Cloud Computing, M-learning, Virtual Machines (VM), XEN Cloud Platform (XCP), OpenStack, V-Lab. Keywords Cloud Computing, E-Learning, M-Learning, Virtual Labs. 1. INTRODUCTION Time and place are major constraints in learning and education field. But nowadays it becomes easy because of newly emerged technologies and rapid development in electronic and telecommunication and computer science field. Mobile Learning called M-Learning is subset of E-Learning and both are part of distance education. Research shows that shipment in mobile phones and smart phones in previous last four years is rapidly increased as compared to PC’s, laptops and desktop computers and tabs. Everyone is carrying mobile phones for doing their day to day activities. So why not in learning and education field. People are started using mobile devices for learning purpose. Virtual classrooms are available on mobile devices so no need to go at predefined location and predefined time. But attending only theory classes is not helpful. For better understandings hands-on experiments are required but unfortunately we cannot perform hands-on experiments using mobile devices we need to go laboratories for performing such experiments. In this paper we tried to overcome this problem by proposing new brand methodology and implementation methods for creating virtual laboratories on mobile devices for network security education see Fig.1. Virtual laboratories for studying network security are making importance for students, faculties and researchers. Traditional physical laboratories require purchasing high cost equipments such as routers, switches, firewalls, host computers, etc. Reconfiguration and maintenance of these physical laboratories are very difficult and time consuming. For networks security education we require highly flexible, scalable and reconfigurable and isolated laboratories. Therefore our traditional physical laboratories are not suitable for doing such experiments. We cannot use internet for doing Network security experiments because any experimental attack like man in middle or denial of service attack may damage the hardware or software’s so these experiments are vulnerable for outside world in perspective of information, data, or software and hardware. So better to use virtual networks for doing such experiments. In case any damage happens then simply reconstruct new laboratory and continue our work. In this paper we proposed a new technique for implementing mobile virtual laboratories for performing network security experiments. Using XEN cloud computing platform and OpenStack we are creating a virtual laboratory because XEN and OpenStack are open source virtual computing platforms. XEN Cloud Platform (XCP) and OpenStack are major components of this virtual laboratory. For accessing, reconstructing and reconfiguring this virtual lab remotely we provide an attractive GUI on android based application. Rest of the paper is organized as follows Section I gives introduction of the topic and overall idea. Section II presents background of E-Learning and M-Learning with evolution, Section III provides related work and advantages and drawbacks, V-lab proposed architecture is explained in section IV ,Section V gives Conclusion and finally Section VI gives future scope.