Federated Cybersecurity Testbed as a Service (FCTaaS) Framework to Federate Cybersecurity Testbeds

Jul 16, 2026

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Rapid technological change driven by domains such as autonomous vehicles and smart manufacturing creates urgent security and training questions in system design, operations, and research methodology. Cybersecurity testbeds enable controlled experimentation, but fast innovation makes them hard and costly to keep state-of-the-art, while access is limited to small communities. The proposed FCTaaS framework federates two heterogeneous cybersecurity testbeds for single experiments over a VPN, enabling testbed discovery and remote experiment design. Evaluation in denial-of-service and IDS/IPS workflows shows 49% network utilization, 1% overhead, and low latency across distributed nodes while preserving visibility into attacks and system stress.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

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Pages31

Reading Time1 h 18 min

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arXiv :2607 . 1006 1v 1 [ cs .CR] 11 Jul 2026 [http://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2026.000000](http://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2026.000000) ARTICLE Federated Cybersecurity Testbed as a Service (FCTaaS): A framework to federate cybersecurity testbeds Josh Dean 1 , Yu-Zheng Lin 1 , John Paul Martin Encinas 1 , Ibrahim Almazyad 1 , Qinxuan Shi3 , Zhanglong Yang3 , Shalaka Satam 1 , Tingjun Lei3 , Jielun Zhang3 , Sicong Shao3 *, Salim Hariri 1 , and Pratik Satam 1,2 * 1Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA 2Department of Systems and Industrial Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA 3School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, USA *Corresponding Author: Pratik Satam and Sicong Shao, [Email: pratiksatam@arizona.edu](Email: pratiksatam@arizona.edu), [sicong.shao@und.edu](sicong.shao@und.edu)[ ](sicong.shao@und.edu)Version July 02, 2026 submitted to Comput Mater Contin ABSTRACT: Rapid technological change is transforming our society with the emergence of new fields such as Autonomous Vehicles and Smart Manufacturing, posing new research questions and challenges in system design, operations, security, and training. Researchers rely on testbeds to create experimental scenarios to solve these research challenges. These testbeds aid in data collection, analysis, and observation of the research problem, and in measuring the efficacy of the proposed solution. However, the rapid pace of modern innovation makes it challenging and cost-prohibitive for these testbeds to represent state-of-the-art scenarios, which require expensive upgradesand the addition of new capabilities. In addition, a small, select community of researchers has access to these specialized testbeds, which are not used optimally during their short operational lifecycles. This paper presents FCTaaS: Federated Cybersecurity Testbed as a Service, a scalable framework that bridges the current gaps in existing federation frameworks by enabling two heterogeneous cybersecurity testbeds to participate in a single experiment, overcoming testbed geographical boundaries to address today’s research challenges. This federation allows multiple geographically isolated testbeds to work together to conduct experiments over a Virtual Private Network (VPN), while providing researchers with interfaces for testbed discovery and remote experiment design. Our experimental evaluation stresses the FCTaaS by assessing its performance in Denial-of-Service Scenarios on smart infrastructure and by evaluating intrusion detection and prevention workflows using a Suricata-based intrusion detection and prevention system (IDS/IPS) testbed. The limiting network utilization of 49% and low overhead of 1%, even under such resource-intensive attack scenarios, demonstrates the efficacy ofFCTaaS across three case studies thus enabling improved experimentation while preserving visibility into attack traffic, IDS alerts, and detection-system resource stress with latency ranging from 5.63 ms between local nodes to 147 ms between disbursed nodes. KEYWORDS: federated cybersecurity testbeds; testbed-as-a-service; cyber-physical systems security; industry 4.0 security; digital twins security 1 Introduction The growing integration of communication networks, artificial intelligence (AI), and automated control has expanded the scale and complexity of cyber-physical systems (CPS) . These developments are central to applications such as smart manufacturing, autonomous systems, energy infrastructure, and digital twins. At the same time, they introduce new challenges in system design, operational management, cybersecurity, © 2026 by the Authors. Submitted to Comput Mater Contin for under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permitted unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. and workforce training. In particular

FAQs

What problem does FCTaaS address in cybersecurity experimentation?

FCTaaS addresses the difficulty and high cost of keeping standalone cybersecurity testbeds up to date, along with limited access and suboptimal utilization during their short operational lifecycles.

How does FCTaaS connect geographically separated testbeds?

FCTaaS federates multiple isolated cybersecurity testbeds to run experiments together over a Virtual Private Network (VPN), while supporting testbed discovery and remote experiment design interfaces.

What were the main results of the performance evaluation?

The evaluation highlights limiting network utilization of 49% with low overhead of 1% under resource-intensive denial-of-service scenarios, with latency ranging from 5.63 ms between local nodes to 147 ms between distributed nodes, across three case studies.

Jul 16, 2026

Upload by Noah