One Among 19 Cyber Ranges in China
With government funding, massive computational capacity, and ties to the military, Peng Cheng Lab is likely to be actively used by state hacking teams. Notably, this cyber range, which facilitates military-civil fusion, has supercomputers, research facilities for AI, ICS, smart cars, etc. It is known to have hosted cyber competitions.
The lab is led by the Guangdonag Provincial Laboratory of Cyberspace Science and Technology and built with funding from the Guangdong provincial and Shenzhen municipal governments. It aims to provide computational power to groups conducting research on a large number of topics.
Based on the lab’s known partnerships (see below), these groups include academics, industry, and military researchers. Peng Cheng Lab enumerated areas of research extends to robotics, virtual reality, smart lasers, and “electromagnetic cognition.”
Peng Cheng Lab has built a powerful supercomputer, Cloudbrain-II Based on available data, Cloudbrain-II is estimated to be half as fast as the world’s fastest supercomputer, Fugaku in Japan. Its most famous contribution to China’s public research so far has been the computational power it provided to train China’s PanGu large language model. Peng Cheng Lab aims to provide similar computation resources to work on cyber ranges and AI and cyber research.
Peng Cheng Lab also hosts cyber ranges for industrial control systems, smart cars, cybersecurity development, and AI. The facility’s work on industrial control systems appears aimed at securing IoT devices used to implement “smart manufacturing”—a policy goal formalized in a recent five-year plan. Smart cars, part of the electric vehicle revolution and a topic of concern in China’s Three-Year Action Plan for the High-Quality Development of the Cybersecurity Industry (2021-2023), receive their own cyber range. The Internet of Vehicles Lab is being built in concert with central government regulators under the China Automotive Technology and Research Center in Tianjin.
Peng Cheng Lab issued contracts to build its AI cyber range within months of opening in 2019. The contracts were quickly followed with public events promoting research on AI in China. The Shenzhen-based lab hosted China’s National AI Competition in late 2020, which counted leaders from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, leading Chinese universities, and private firms among its participants.
Projects focused on cybersecurity advanced just as quickly. Peng Cheng Lab hosted an inaugural conference on cyber range research in mid-2019 and has done so at least once since then. After China’s National Cybersecurity Center for Education and Innovation opened in 2020, Peng Cheng Lab began partnering with the facility. In 2021, Peng Cheng Lab joined the National Cybersecurity Center, Sichuan University, and a cybersecurity park in Qingdao in jointly hosting a cybersecurity competition. Qi An Xin Technology Group, a Chinese cybersecurity company active at the National Cybersecurity Center and one of China’s 20 “invisible champions” of national security technology, may have facilitated Peng Cheng Lab’s engagement—the company won a contract to construct Peng Cheng Lab’s AI cyber range. The lab’s rapid integration into existing cybersecurity and AI research initiatives across the country by Qi An Xin indicate it is taken seriously by other leading researchers in China. As of 2022. such cooperation appears to be organic and not centrally dictated.
The lab’s list of partners is growing rapidly. Since opening its doors in 2019, Peng Cheng Lab has formed research partnerships with other Chinese institutions. The lab partners with 21 universities, 13 research organizations, and 25 businesses or SOEs. Among the organizations participating in the initiative, prominent institutions include several of China’s premier universities, such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. One school tied to state-sponsored hacking campaigns and co-located on a PLA base, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, also partners with Peng Cheng Lab. Shanghai Jiao Tong University is also subject to a 2017 agreement with the PLA Strategic Support Force to develop “new combat forces.”
Likewise, China’s National University of Defense Technology and the Key Laboratory of Science and Technology for National Defense are listed among its partnerships with research organizations. The collection of collaborators reads as a who’s who of Chinese high-tech research talent. Peng Cheng Lab names entities like BGI, China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, China Electronics Corporation, China Electronics Technology Group, iFlyTek, and HiSense among its corporate and defense-SOE partners. The US Department of Commerce has listed many of these businesses on its Entity List.
Of the cyber ranges discussed in this report, Peng Cheng Lab stands out for its association with Li Jianhua, a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Li currently runs a PLA-affiliated lab which researches the applications of AI to cybersecurity research for both offensive and defensive purposes. His work is also featured in Robot Hacking Games, China’s version of DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge.
Li is one of China’s leading experts on cyber policy. In 2018, he published an article extolling the importance of cyber ranges and offered a detailed path for successful development. Li argued that the ability to rapidly recreate networks is critically important, a capability which can facilitate attack planning. He specifically suggested the use of AI to aid both defenders in detecting intrusions and in “decision making” during range operations.
Given Li’s prominence, his involvement in Peng Cheng Lab suggests it is among the more sophisticated cyber ranges developed by China. His involvement, his school’s history of working with China’s security services, the technical capabilities of the lab, and the lab’s partnership with military institutions indicate it may be used by the PLA to practice offensive operations. Li’s institution, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, is listed among the lab’s strategic partners, alongside defense-SOEs and the PLA’s National University of Defense Technology. Further, given Li’s focus on AI and ties to the security services, Peng Cheng Lab is well-situated to enable AI-aided attack planning. One possible scenario would allow offensive operators to further hone their attacks by applying machine learning to attack simulations made possible by the range.
Based on “Downrange: A Survey of China’s Cyber Ranges”, A report by Center for Security and Emerging Technology, 2022
