The InSpiRe lab is located within the research facilities of the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Victoria. Its focus is on addressing systems-level security/privacy and distributed systems issues within large-scale IT systems and networks.

To support this work a state of the art $500+k Cyber-security/privacy and distributed systems research test bed is being constructed.

This facility is designed to allow for the exact re-instantiation of the real-time network traffic environments existing within corporate-scale networks, under the rigorous scientific constraints of experimental control and repeatability. 

The facility's principal design is to support the capability of exactly mirroring in, and then automatically executing, cyber-security experiments on an on-demand basis, inclusive of:   

• All system OSes.
• All network switch configurations.
• All background network traffic events (either through re-playing recorder traffic traces or through generating traffic which meets statistical models). 
• All overlaid attack and normal traffic events.

In this way, the facility will support research into assessing the robustness and sensitivity of various existing and proposed security/distributed systems approaches under real-world conditions. This capability is being enabled  through the development of custom experiment control and management software.

Achieving this ability to exactly re-instantiate at-scale experiments is critical if the research results are to be real-world applicable.

2003 - 2012 Information Security and Privacy Research (InSPiRe) Laboratory, University of Victoria