Internet Emulator

The objective of the SEED-Emulator project is to help create emulators of the Internet. These emulators are for educational uses, and they can be used as the platform for designing hands-on lab exercises for various subjects, including cybersecurity, networking, etc.

The project provides essential elements of the Internet (as Python classes), including Internet exchanges, autonomous systems, BGP routers, DNS infrastructure, a variety of services. Users can use these elements as the building blocks to build their emulation programmatically. The output of the program is a set of docker container folders/files. When these containers are built and started, they form a small-size Internet. New building blocks are being added, including Blockchain, Botnet, and many other useful elements of the Internet.

Table of Contents

• Getting Started
• User Manuals
• Contributing
• License

Getting Started

Install the necessary software

To run the emulator, you need to install docker, docker-compose, and python3.

Set up the environment variable

To run the emulator code, you need to add this folder to the PYTHONPATH environment variable. This can be done by running source development.env inside the project's root directory.

Set up the proxy (not needed if you don't have an issue)

The emulator needs to fetch docker images from the Docker Hub. If you are in Mainland China, you may not be able to directly get the docker images. However, there are many docker hub proxies that you can use. Please follow these instructions to set up the docker hub proxies. If you do not have such an issue, please skip this step.

Run Examples

We have provided many examples in the examples/ folder. Detailed explanations are provided the README file in each example folder. To run an example, do the following:

1. Pick an example, for example, A00-simple-as.

2. Build the emulation. For this example, go to examples/A00-simple-as/, and run python3 ./simple-as.py. The container files will be created inside the output/ folder. For some examples, such as B02-mini-internet-with-dns, they depend on other examples, so you need to run those examples first.

3. Build and run the generated containers. First cd output/, then do docker-compose build && docker-compose up. The emulator will start running. Give it a minute or two (or longer if your emulator is large) to let the routers do their jobs.

4. Some examples already include the visualization container (called Internet Map). Point your browser to http://127.0.0.1:8080/map.html, and you will see the visualization. More instructions on how to use the visualization app is given in this manual. If the map is not included, you can open a new terminal window, navigate to the project root directory, cd to client/, and run docker-compose build && docker-compose up. This will bring up the Internet Map container.

User Manuals

User manuals are provided inside the docs/user_manual/ folder.

Contributing

Contributions to SEED-Emulator are always welcome. For contribution guidelines, please see CONTRIBUTING.

License

The software is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 license, with copyright by The SEED-Emulator Developers (see LICENSE).