Introduction
2025 has been a remarkable year for hands-on cybersecurity training. As organizations, universities, and security teams continue to prioritize real world experience over theory, the demand for realistic, reliable, and instantly accessible simulations has grown tremendously.
At Simulation Labs, our mission is to make creating hands-on learning easy and fast for everyone without worrying about infrastructure, servers, or setup. Whether you are a CTF organizer, instructor, or security team lead running internal assessments or large-scale cyber drills, you should focus on teaching, testing, or learning, not managing machines or environments.
Here are the top features of 2025 that help make simulations effortless, fair, and secure.
Challenge Containers: Create Custom, Realistic Labs With Zero Setup
One of the biggest upgrades this year was making it incredibly easy to create custom, realistic challenges through Challenge Containers. Many creators wanted the flexibility to build their own environments—especially web apps or multi-service setups—without dealing with hosting, ports, or infrastructure. So we designed a workflow that gives them total control while removing all the complexity.
How it Works
Creators simply upload their Docker container. From that moment, Simulation Labs takes over every part of deployment automatically.
Our system:
- Processes the container
- Hosts it securely
- Configures networking and routing
- Generates a ready-to-use challenge link
- Spins up isolated instances for every player
This workflow allows users to offer realistic, hands-on scenarios where participants interact with a live environment to solve the challenge. These are perfect for topics like exploitation, privilege escalation, and network security.
Automatic Isolated Environments for Every Participant
Running hands-on simulations at scale often comes with a major challenge: shared environments. When multiple participants use the same machines or services, conflicts quickly appear. One user can break the challenge for others, change configurations, or consume shared resources, leading to inconsistent experiences and unreliable results.
In 2025, Simulation Labs made isolated environments the default for every challenge and simulation.
How isolated environments work
When a participant starts a challenge, Simulation Labs automatically provisions a dedicated environment just for them. This environment includes everything required to complete the challenge and is fully separated from all other participants.
Each participant receives:
- Their own running machines or containers
- Their own data and system state
- A clean environment on every start or reset
No two participants ever share the same instance.
Why this matters
Isolated environments remove an entire class of problems for both organizers and participants.
For participants, it means they can freely explore, experiment, and even make mistakes without worrying about affecting others. Advanced techniques such as exploitation, privilege escalation, and service disruption behave exactly as they would in a real world scenario.
For organizers and instructors, it means:
- Consistent starting conditions for everyone
- No broken challenges due to shared usage
- No manual resets or environment cleanup
- Reliable results that reflect real skills
Built for scale and reliability
Isolation also allows Simulation Labs to scale smoothly. Whether you are running a small classroom lab, a company-wide cyber drill, a public CTF, or a large branded competition with hundreds or thousands of participants, every user gets the same stable experience.
When a session ends, environments are automatically cleaned up, ensuring the next participant always starts fresh. There is no infrastructure to manage and no environments to monitor manually.
By making isolated environments the default, Simulation Labs ensures simulations are reliable, fair, and easy to run at any scale, allowing creators and participants to focus entirely on learning and problem solving.
Ensuring Fairness with Dynamic Flags
Fair scoring is one of the hardest problems in cybersecurity training. In traditional CTFs or hands-on exercises, if one participant discovers the flag, nothing stops them from sharing it with others. The result?
- Scores stop reflecting skill.
- Organizers lose visibility into who actually solved the challenge.
- The educational value drops dramatically.
Simulation Labs solves this with Dynamic Flags, a system built to guarantee integrity from the moment a challenge starts.
How Dynamic Flags Work
Instead of using a single static flag for everyone, Simulation Labs generates a unique flag per participant or per team at the moment their environment is created.
Each flag is tied to the user ID and the environment instance, which means no two players ever receive the same flag.
If a participant tries using another participant’s flag, the platform detects this participant as a cheater.
