A Specialized Tool for Simulating Lock-Keeper Data Transfer

Simulation is an efficient way to model a real system by a computer program and is used to study and evaluate the characteristics or behaviors of the system. In this paper, we present an effective simulation tool that is designed for simulating the working procedure of the Lock-Keeper system, which is a high level security device for physically separating two networks. Due to the special mechanism of data exchange within the Lock-Keeper system, it is a challenging task to specify the Lock-Keeper's performance for a given application scenario. To get enough performance data, the intuitive way is to practically conduct numerous testing experiments and then analyze their results, which is extremely time consuming. Therefore, we are motivated to design and implement a simulator to predict the Lock-Keeper performance theoretically. Compare with most of available network simulation tools, the proposed simulator is capable of simulating the transfer of application layer data, i.e., file based data streams. The simulator is built based on a simple model of the Lock-Keeper data exchange procedure. Information on a target application scenario can be specified within an XML file, which is used as the input for the later calculation. Several kinds of reports are generated by this specialized simulator to indicate how the data is exchanged through Lock-Keeper. To verify the simulation results, we conduct several experiments, which practically test data transfer for the scenarios using the real Lock-Keeper system. The comparison between theoretical simulation and practical testing proves the effectiveness of our proposed simulation tool.