UMBC CyberRange Portal

Context & Goals

UMBC’s cybersecurity courses needed an on-demand lab platform that could provision isolated VMware environments per class cohort, map campus SSO roles to fine-grained app permissions, and expose real-time health metrics for faculty. Prior iterations depended on manual vCenter templates, ad-hoc spreadsheets, and no audit history. I owned the rewrite—from research and system design to the production cutover.

Constraints

• Keep all student traffic on university infrastructure with strict network segmentation
• Integrate with UMBC’s Shibboleth SAML identity provider for faculty and student cohorts
• Meet FERPA guidelines with full audit trail and per-action logging
• Deliver a responsive UI that instructors can self-serve without VMware expertise

Architecture

graph LR
  subgraph Frontend
    UI[Next.js App Router]
    UI -->|ISR + SWR| GHCache[GitHub Activity Cache]
  end
  subgraph Backend
    API[Node/Express API]
    Queue[Provision Worker Queue]
    Mongo[(MongoDB)]
    Postgres[(PostgreSQL)]
  end
  subgraph Infra
    VC[VMware vCenter]
    Docker[Docker Swarm]
    Nginx[NGINX]
    Loki[Logs/Promtail]
  end

  UI --> API
  API --> Mongo
  API --> Postgres
  API --> Queue
  Queue --> VC
  VC -->|events| API
  API -->|metrics| Loki
  Nginx --> UI
  Nginx --> API
  Plausible((Plausible Analytics)) --> UI

• UI: Next.js 14 App Router with Tailwind/shadcn/ui, React Query for real-time VM status, and React Three Fiber visuals for lab topology.
• APIs: Express services layered behind Zod validation and rate limiting; workers pull jobs for vCenter provisioning via VMware PowerCLI scripts executed in Node.
• Data: MongoDB stores session/audit data, PostgreSQL tracks course-to-lab relationships and RBAC policies for analytics.
• Infra: Docker + NGINX reverse proxy with TLS, health checks, and blue-green deploys. Promtail + Loki collect logs, while Grafana dashboards surface metrics to faculty.

Key Challenges & Solutions

SAML/SSO mapping & session security

• Implemented SAML SSO with signed assertions, encrypted NameIDs, and faculty/student role mapping using campus LDAP attributes.
• Hardened session cookies (SameSite=strict, HttpOnly, AES-encrypted session store) with CSRF tokens and JWT audience checks.
• Added admin impersonation logging for compliance reviews.

vCenter automation playbooks

• Built a provisioning worker that clones golden templates, attaches class-specific networks, triggers post-provision Ansible scripts, and reports readiness back to the portal.
• Snapshots and tear-down flows run on schedule, reclaiming resources nightly and posting metrics into Grafana.
• Designed a deterministic naming convention for VMs and resource pools, allowing zero-touch cleanup.

Role-based access + audit trail

• Established RBAC roles (Faculty, TA, Student, Admin) with fine-grained scopes for power operations, console access, and log reviews.
• Every sensitive action (console connect, reimage, credential download) emits audit events via Mongo change streams to a compliance queue and is persisted in PostgreSQL for reporting.

Developer Experience

• Standardized local development through Docker Compose, bundling Next.js, API, workers, and a mock SAML IdP.
• NGINX handles service routing, websockets, certificate termination, and health endpoints for Vercel previews and on-prem installs.
• Added pre-flight diagnostics (vCenter connectivity, template health, DB migrations) to catch issues before release.
• Continuous delivery via GitHub Actions with lint, type-check, Playwright suite, and Lighthouse scores gating deploys.

Results

• Faculty launch labs in minutes, verifying readiness visually from the portal rather than CLI scripts.
• Audit data satisfies campus security reviews with exportable CSV snapshots.
• Students receive deterministic, clean environments with ephemeral credentials, eliminating VM conflicts.

What I’d do next

• Autoscale provisioning workers based on queue depth with a Kubernetes operator.
• Implement per-course pool warmups to eliminate cold start times during peak class turnover.
• Self-service lab builder for faculty, letting them compose VM templates and network recipes without engineering tickets.