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
• Documentation
• Contributing
• License

Getting Started

To get started with the emulator, install docker, docker-compose, and python3. Then, take a look at the examples/ folder for examples. Detailed explanation is provided in the README file, as well as in the comments of the code. To run an example:

1. Pick an example, say A00-simple-peering.
2. Add seedemu to PYTHONPATH. This can be done by running source development.env under the project root directory.
3. Build the emulation. For this example, cd to examples/A00-simple-peering/, and run python3 ./simple-peering.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. This is part of our component design.
4. Build and run the 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.
5. Optionally, start the seedemu web client. Open a new terminal window, navigate to the project root directory, cd to client/, and run docker-compose build && docker-compose up. Then point your browser to http://127.0.0.1:8080/map.html, and you will see the entire emulator. Use the filter box if you want to see the packet flow.

Documentation

Documentation is in progress inside the docs/ 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).