FACT SHEET
www.eda.europa.eu
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CYBER RANGES FEDERATION PROJECT
To secure and exploit all the opportunities offered by cyberspace (commonly considered as the fifth domain of warfare),
disposing of a highly skilled and well-trained personnel specialised in the cyber domain and having the ability to test and
verify cyber defence-related equipment is crucial for any cyber defence capability.
Background
The importance of cyber range facilities in support of training
and exercises was recognised in the 2014 Capability Development Plan (CDP) as an important capability gap that needs to be
urgently tackled. It was also observed that, while many Member
States were already building military cyber ranges, their efficiency would depend on their ability to cover the full scope of
simulation activities and provide a realistic and effective experience to users. However, the complexity of the cyberspace, the
wide range of attack vectors and many other factors made it
very difficult to concentrate the full scope of activities into a
single cyber range. Consequently, in May 2017, EDA launched the
Cyber Ranges Federation project which aims to pool and share
existing cyber ranges capabilities between Member States. The
project currently has eight participating Member States (pMS),
namely Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Italy, Latvia
and Sweden.
The cyber ranges participating in the project are multi-purpose
environments supporting three primary processes: (1) education,
training and exercises (ETE); (2) asset test and risk analysis; and
(3) cyber defence exercises and knowledge sharing. The project
objective is to develop a sophisticated and powerful platform at
European level not by building a new cyber range, but instead by
interconnecting Member States’ national cyber defence exercises
communities (including countries that do not have their own cyber
ranges), in order to allow each of the participating members to
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train and further improve their respective cyber defence skills as
well as to enhance the functionalities and capacities of existing,
emerging and future cyber ranges.
The specificity and relevance of the project reside in the fact that
it is one of the first European initiatives aiming to join existing
national cyber ranges together and create a supportive
community. The establishment of such a community allows
for the sharing of information, knowledge and experience on the
development, establishment and operation of cyber ranges. The
project success relies on the community built around the project
which, on the one hand, developed and implemented the project
features and, on the other hand, uses the developed training
and exercise features in accordance with a Memorandum of
Understanding also developed by the project.
During the project’s first phase , between 2017 and 2019, a
technical architecture as well as a support community (including
a legal and operational governance model) were developed, all
based on technical requirements for cyber training and exercise
platforms. The project also performed a series of market studies
and a review of the related state-of-the-art technologies.
This phase ended with a live multinational demonstration
exercise held in Helsinki, Finland in November 2019 during
the EDA Project Team Cyber Defence Meeting, showcasing the
practical implications and benefits of connecting and jointly
using Member States’ cyber ranges to improve and expand their
cyber training capabilities.
Updated: 5 July 2021