Cyber Range Homogenization: From Standard-Aligned Architecture to Formal Modeling and Systematic Evaluation through the lens of a Wi-Fi-Based Prototype

Cyber Ranges (CRs) are increasingly being utilized as controlled platforms for cybersecurity education, training, experimentation, and assessment. However, despite CRs' growing adoption across diverse settings, including academia, industry, and critical-infrastructure contexts, their design, representation, and evaluation remain fragmented. Namely, there is an evident lack of standardized architectural foundations, formal modeling approaches, and systematic assessment methodologies. This heterogeneity limits interoperability, comparability, and reusability across CR implementations, hindering CRs' evolution from ad hoc environments into systematically engineered infrastructures. At the same time, driven by the fourth industrial revolution, the increasing integration of wireless technologies, and particularly IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi), into industrial and mission-critical environments necessitates more realistic and reproducible CR-based experimentation to faithfully conduct wireless-specific security experimentation and training under controlled conditions. This thesis addresses these challenges through four objectives.

First, it defines a standards-aligned, fine-grained reference architecture for CRs, grounded in ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 and informed by established CR guidelines, integrating structural, functional, and informational views into a unified architectural description. Second, it develops supporting modules for CR design, development, and evaluation. Namely, it introduces an ontology-based formal model for machine-interpretable CR representation and an explainable evaluation methodology for assessing architectural conformance through multi-criteria decision-making. Third, it establishes an empirical foundation to motivate wireless security research as the domain of application, systematically reviewing wireless-oriented security testbeds in the cyber-physical domain and conducting an empirical measurement-driven study of Wi-Fi deployments and security configurations in mission-critical settings. Fourth, it demonstrates the applicability of the proposed framework through a Wi-Fi-oriented CR proof-of-concept (PoC), which is supported by tailored open-source tools for vulnerability discovery and protocol-aware experimentation in IEEE 802.11 environments.

Collectively, the thesis contributes a framework for CR lifecycle engineering, spanning architectural design, formal representation, and systematic evaluation. The practical relevance of the framework is grounded in the domain of wireless security experimentation, specifically Wi-Fi. In this respect, the resulting Wi-Fi-oriented PoC and manually crafted open-source assessment tools showcase how the proposed architectural and methodological foundations can be instantiated in practice; thus, supporting reproducible security research, training, and experimentation. Altogether, this thesis advances the state-of-the-art by moving CR engineering from a fragmented, tool-centric practice toward a standards-aligned, formally modeled, and systematically evaluated process, with Wi-Fi security serving as the use-case domain in which the framework is motivated, instantiated, and validated.