Design and Evaluation of a Hybrid Cyber Range Architecture for Secure, Scalable and Realistic Cyber-Physical Training Environments

About the project

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Design and Evaluation of a Hybrid Cyber Range Architecture for Secure, Scalable and Realistic Cyber-Physical Training Environments

School: School of Science and Technology

Study mode(s): Full-time

Starting: 2026

Funding: UK student / EU student (non-UK) / International student (non-EU) / Fully-funded

Project overview

This PhD will investigate the design of a next-generation Hybrid Cyber Range that combines on-premises infrastructure with cloud and virtualised environments to support realistic, scalable and secure cyber experimentation. The research will focus on architectural trade-offs between realism, performance and cost, and will develop evaluation metrics to assess the effectiveness of the cyber range for training, research and industrial use cases.

This will involve the development and evaluation of the hybrid cyber range architectures that seamlessly integrate on-premises systems, virtual machines, container platforms and cloud services to achieve high realism, security and performance.

Research Aim and Question:

This project will be a lab based and there's an opportunity to collaborate with the funder.

This project will make an original contribution by defining and empirically validating new architectural models and performance, realism trade-offs for hybrid cyber ranges that do not currently exist in the literature.

Supervisory team

Tawfik Al-Hadhrami

Ali Sadiq

Omprakash Kaiwartya

David Brown

Abdallah Naser

• Advances the theoretical foundations and practical implementation of hybrid cyber ranges.
• How can hybrid cyber range architectures balance performance, realism and security across on-premises, virtualised and cloud environments?

Entry qualifications

• A bachelor (First Class or 2:1 equivalent in UK and master’s degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science, Cyber Security or related field.
• Strong software skills in an experience or exposure with ML frameworks.
• Familiarity with networking hardware, tools, technologies
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Knowledge of operational technology is an advantage.
• Proven ability to publish papers in peer journals is and advantage.

How to apply

Please visit our how to apply page for a step-by-step guide.

Applications close Friday 30 January 2026 with interviews planned to take place from Monday 2 February to Friday 16 February 2026 .

This project belongs to a series of similar research projects, name the project title at the start of your application statement to ensure your application is considered for the correct title.

Fees and funding

The PhD will be fully funded by the University (via an Externally funded Research Project). The funding covers monthly stipend, tuition fee, travel for conferences as well as access to state-of-the-art Cyber Range testbed lab and related research equipment.

Guidance and support

Find out about guidance and support for PhD students .

Still need help?

Contact Dr Tawfik Al-Hadhrami on:

• Email: tawfik.al-hadhrami@ntu.ac.uk

Research areas