Portable Lab Format (PLF): Portable OT Labs Inside Labshock
A new system for exporting, importing, and running industrial OT labs across different environments.
One of the biggest challenges in industrial cybersecurity labs is portability.
Teams can spend days or weeks building OT environments, configuring SCADA systems, connecting PLCs, and creating industrial network topologies, only to discover that the entire environment becomes difficult to move or reproduce on another machine.
To solve this problem, Labshock introduces PLF — Portable Lab Format.
PLF is designed to make OT labs portable, reproducible, and executable across different Labshock environments without requiring manual rebuilding.
The problem with traditional OT labs
In many industrial cybersecurity projects, lab environments become tightly coupled to the original infrastructure where they were created.
Moving these labs often requires: - manual SCADA reconfiguration - rebuilding network topologies - reconnecting PLC systems - fixing broken dependencies - adjusting communication settings
This becomes especially difficult in cyber-physical OT environments involving: - water systems - railway simulations - oil and gas infrastructure - external PLC integrations - sensor-based process logic
During OT.SEC.CON testing scenarios, multiple industrial environments were moved between systems to support demonstrations and operational simulations. This exposed major stability and portability issues in traditional OT lab deployment workflows.
Portable Lab Format (PLF)
PLF introduces a standardized export and import system for OT labs inside Labshock.
The workflow is designed around three core steps:
1. Build the environment Users create industrial network topologies using Builder, including: - routers - PLC systems - SCADA services - network segments - industrial services
2. Export the lab The complete OT environment is packaged into a portable format.
3. Import and run anywhere The same environment can then be imported into another Labshock instance and executed without rebuilding infrastructure manually.
This removes the need for repeated configuration and significantly reduces deployment complexity.
Gas station OT simulation example
The first large-scale environment built with PLF is a gas station scenario inspired by the General Electric MS5002E industrial turbine architecture.
The environment includes: - 6 routers - 13 network segments - automatically configured infrastructure - industrial process simulation components
Instead of rebuilding complex infrastructure manually, users can focus directly on: - OT attacks - detection engineering - SIEM validation - industrial security testing - operational learning
Why portable OT labs matter
Portable OT environments enable: - reproducible industrial cybersecurity testing - faster deployment of training labs - consistent OT SIEM validation - collaborative industrial security research - easier sharing of cyber-physical scenarios
This changes OT labs from static infrastructure projects into reusable operational systems.
The future of OT simulation
Portable Lab Format is part of a larger goal inside Labshock:
making industrial cybersecurity environments testable, shareable, and executable like software infrastructure.
Instead of fighting infrastructure complexity, security teams can focus on understanding industrial processes, validating detections, and improving operational visibility.
OT security must be testable, not documented.