TECHX LAB

TechX offers resources for a wide variety of activities and interests. Student teams come to TechX to work on their capstone projects, professors conduct research and hold classes, and students use the lab for studying, completing personal projects, and relaxing while playing video games with friends.

Collaborative Work Environments

Dr. Crate is an associate professor in Computer Information Systems who teaches a senior design course. As part of this course, students are required to work on teams to design, create, and present a project to an industry advisory board to showcase the scope of the knowledge they have learned over the last four years. To help the teams in his class better collaborate, Dr. Crate reserves the lab to be used as the venue of the course. Here, the students select one of several study areas, including three private rooms. Each area comes equipped with a TV display and an HDMI connection, so showcasing progress and collaboration is as easy as connecting a cable.

Groundbreaking Research

Caroline is a graduate student in Computer Science and is researching a solution for security pertaining to the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. The TechX Lab contains a wide array of IoT equipment, including smart hubs, Amazon Echo’s, dimmers, Fitbits, a smart crockpot, and more. As part of her project, Caroline uses these resources to complete innovative research that can be applied on a global scale.

Security Lab

Helping conduct research for a future cybersecurity course, senior lab technician John is designing a virtual hacking lab where students can test offensive and defensive skills in safe environments. The security lab is centered around creating a safe, replicable system that can simulate a network environment with vulnerable network connected systems. Using this lab, students will gain practical experience learning about cybersecurity and improving their security engineering skill-set. This hacking lab will instruct students on the use of the cyber kill chain, analyzing security log information, ethical hacking, lateral movement across a network, penetration testing, and analyzing threat intelligence.

Distributed Pi Cluster

Christopher is creating a Raspberry Pi cluster for a year-long hacking competition, complete with a visual interface. The hacking competition will include a map of Louisiana Tech’s campus, user leaderboards, server information, TechX Lab information, and challenges for participants to complete. Each structure on the map is a Tech building. These structures represent the Pis in the cluster and show the status of each Pi’s server. Participants compete to keep their servers up the longest and complete the most challenges. Challenges will include finding passwords hidden with steganography, WEP and WPA cracking, and reverse engineering. The goal of this project is to teach participants cyber defense techniques that will help them in their future careers.

Recreation and Leisure

Will is a freshman Cyber Engineering major and an avid gamer. He and his friends, Brandon and Hunter, come over to the lab during slow hours to relax and play Battlefield 1 on one of the lab’s assorted consoles (PS4 or Xbox One). After they play, Hunter and Brandon leave to finish an assignment Will has already completed. Will relaxes on one of the lab’s couches, logs into his Netflix account on a lab Apple TV, and watches an episode of Walking Dead before the lab closes for the night.