Using Vagrant to Build a Manageable and Sharable Intrusion Detection Lab

This paper investigates how the Vagrant software application can be used by Information Security (InfoSec) professionals looking to provide their audience with an infrastructure environment to accompany their research. InfoSec professionals conducting research or publishing write-ups can provide opportunities for their audience to replicate or walk through the research themselves in their own environment. Vagrant is a popular DevOps tool for providing portable and repeatable production environments for application developers, and may solve the needs of the InfoSec professional. This paper will investigate how Vagrant works, the pros and cons of the technology, and how it is typically used. The paper describes how to build or repurpose three environments, highlighting different features of Vagrant. Finally, the paper will discuss lessons learned.