Building a security Home Lab

February 28, 2018 · Uncategorised

I get asked a lot about how to create a home and what hardware is required?

The truth is you don’t need to start out   here is a pic of my home closet super-duper data center ….it’s not a data center lol

Here it is in all its glory my Lab

I have done a lot of work to reduce the amount of physical devices that I have instead I have a single high specs desktop with a couple of managed switches a separate desktop PC which acts as my “edge firewall) – SOPHOS UTM

I have a Cisco router ( Cisco 1841 router)

Gigabit Desktop switch ( D-Link not sure of the model)

Cisco managed switch ( For VLAN separation) I   highly recommend a managed switch

My Main PC has the following hardware specs

CPU- AMD bulldozer 8 core

RAM  – 32G

HDD 1  128GB SSD  ( for main OS)

HDD 2 2TB  mechanical WD drives ( for VM’s and data)

3 – Wired NIC’s

1 Wireless NIC ( For wireless attacks)

I have a few hardware based firewalls from various vendors for testing ( Not required )

I used to have big rack mount servers loud as hell but found that I could scale down with much more power on commodity hardware remember you’re not running a production environment so having normal PC components is absolutely fine

The Setup

While my setup changes a lot based on what I am doing  I normally have my network setup with multiple vlan’sto separate my home network traffic with my lab traffic

My server connects to all of the networks some of the networks I have segregated from the internet those networks I use for malware analysis

I have another network for attack traffic that is on a separate network switch and NIC to the server so when launching attacks I can still manage the server and not knock down my  whole network.

I use VirtualBox and VMware to virtualize all of my servers and GNS I use to virtualize my routing and switching however I do more with the servers than network labs

For the wireless NIC it’s just a USB wireless D-Link NIC that supports monitor mode for things like aircrack and other wireless labs

To set up the actual software and settings from the LAB well that’s based on what you want to do  my LAB is able to handle everything that I need it for

If you need more help and advice on building you lab reach out to me, I would be glad to help you out !