The Cyber Range at Loughborough

In 2026, as part of its increasing commitment to cyber security and cyber resilience teaching and research and teaching Loughborough invested in a cyber range facility. This is in use across post graduate and undergraduate teaching both for module teaching and projects. The range consists of 6 very high spec machines capable of supporting thousands of VMs and containers for large-scale experimentation and labs. This allows us to support several classes of 200 students during term time and then experimentation and project work over the range using thousands of VMs simultaneously.

Specification

Hardware

    • 3072 cores
    • 4.4 TiB RAM
    • 157 TiB of Storage
    • Isolated from Loughborough network except via proxies to prevent malware leaking out
    • Distributed across two sites to provide redundancy in the case of failure

Software

    • Proxmox orchestration
    • Clarified Security’s Catapult and Providentia software to support deployment
    • Ubuntu/Kali and other Linux distributions
    • Support for Kathara for network emulation

Capabilities

    • Virtualisation of over 3,000 machines

Use

    • Teaching advanced network security concepts at scale
    • Teaching network attack and defence
    • Competitions to improve student’s knowledge of red- and blue-teaming
    • Research on very large-scale configuration