Senior Project - tFire

Sandia National Laboratories, located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has developed science-based technologies that support our national security since the lab's inception in 1949. Through science and technology, people, infrastructure, and partnerships, Sandia's mission is to meet national needs in five key areas: Nuclear Weapons, Nonproliferation and Assessments, Military Technologies and Applications, Energy and Infrastructure Assurance, and Homeland Security.

The goal of this project was the development of a software application that will support a joint effort between Sandia National Labs and Los Alamos National Labs called TRACER FIRE. The TRACER FIRE program is a Forensic and Incident Response Exercise (FIRE) simulation and training program designed to enhance the skill set of cyber security analysts throughout the Department of Energy complex of research labs and facilities. The Department of Energy is beginning to build a program that will train and assess the proficiency of its technical staff that performs the daily duties of monitoring the DOE networks for intrusions and compromises of its systems and data integrity.

The project provides a scoring system that will monitor the status of various servers and desktops for their availability and integrity during the operation of TRACER FIREs. There are two different modes being used. First, is the "Jeopardy" mode, where participants will be evaluated on their level of ability prior to the main exercise. Second is "Live" mode, which will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a blue team's defensive actions and a red team's hacking activities.

In particular, the software application provides a website that easily interacts with the users. The program is mainly built with JavaScript/jQuery and AJAX, which makes easy to update each component of the website quickly without refreshing the page. Different features such as sending messages, video tutorials, a challenges and injects repository, a registration system, and save and load system states have been implemented.

tFire is implemented using an MVC (Model View Controller) design to connect the front-end with the back-end. There is a database associated in the back-end, where all the data being used throughout exercise is stored and updated.