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This repository contains the materials as developed and used byRPISEC toteach Modern Binary Exploitation atRensselaer Polytechnic Institute inSpring 2015. This was a university course developed and run solely by students to teachskills in vulnerability research, reverse engineering, and binary exploitation.

Vulnerability research & exploit development is something totally outside the bounds of whatyou see in a normal computer science curriculum, but central to a lot of what we RPISECmembers find ourselves doing in our free time. We also find that subjects in offensivesecurity tend to have a stigma around them in university that we would like to help shakeoff. These are practical, applied skills that we're excited to share with those interestedin learning.

The question this course posed was'Can we teach a bunch of programmers how to pwn?'

Course website:http://security.cs.rpi.edu/courses/binexp-spring2015/

Syllabus:http://security.cs.rpi.edu/courses/binexp-spring2015/Syllabus.pdf

Cybersecurity is one of the fastest growing fields in computer science, though its study is rarely covered in academia due to its rapid pace of development and its technical specificity. Modern Binary Exploitation will focus on teaching practical offensive security skills in binary exploitation and reverse engineering. Through a combination of interactive lectures, hands on labs, and guest speakers from industry, the course will offer students a rare opportunity to explore some of the most technically involved and fascinating subjects in the rapidly evolving field of security.

The course will start off by covering basic x86 reverse engineering, vulnerability analysis, and classical forms of Linux-based userland binary exploitation. It will then transition into protections found on modern systems (Canaries, DEP, ASLR, RELRO, Fortify Source, etc) and the techniques used to defeat them. Time permitting, the course will also cover other subjects in exploitation including kernel-land and Windows based exploitation.

This course carried a prereq ofComputer Organization - CSCI 2500at RPI. Computer Organization is RPI's basic computer architecture course that teachesthings like C, MIPS assembly, x86 assembly, Datapaths, CPU Pipelining, CPU Caching,Memory Mapping, etc.

Our expected demographic for Modern Binary Exploitation was students with zero reverseengineering or binary exploitation knowledge. That said, to be able to take this courseyou will probably need at least the following skills.

• Working knowledge of C/C++
• Any assembly level experience
• Basic Linux command line experience

Refer toERRATA.md for slide corrections.

• src/ - Source code for labs
• setup_wargame.sh,external_tools.sh - Install scripts to setup MBE on an Ubuntu 14.04 32-bit machine
• MBE_release.tar.gz - Binaries for labs and projects
• MBE_lectures.tar.gz - PDFs of all lecture slides
• MBE_VM.vmdk.gz - A vmdk (disk image) of a VM that is already setup

The Warzone is a custom wargame that was built from the ground up for this course. It provideda complete and consistent learning platform for us to release the labs and projects to thestudents. The wargame was built ontop of a vanilla Ubuntu 14.04 32-bit server install, and ismodeled after existing local privilege escalation themed wargames. If you have ever playedthe fantasticIO wargame (formerly hosted at SmashTheStack), the Warzone has asomewhat similar structure.

Some basic tweaks have been made in an attempt to isolate players from each other and createan individual experience, but it's probably far from perfect. It also comes pre-installed withsome tools, scripts, and configs that can make a beginner's life a bit easier in exploitdevelopment.

You can roll with the Warzone we designed, or you can try to setup your own using our scripts.

As the years pass, compilers will change, security will improve, and the challenges in thisrepo may no longer be solvable. Because of this, we have created a virtual machine disk imagethat closely replicates the universal Warzone wargame server we ran for the duration of thiscourse. The VM has all the tools setup, challenges pre-compiled, and lab accounts ready to go.Hopefully it will endure the test of time.

RPISEC is a huge advocate of VMware because of its quality and stability, so we recommendusing our disk image below with VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion, or VMware Player. Thatsaid, it should also work with VirtualBox.

VMware provides a great2 minute video on how to setup a virtual machine using an existing disk image.

1. DownloadMBE_VM.vmdk.gz from our release page
2. Extract the archive to obtain the disk image
3. Using VMware go toFile->New Virtual Machine... and create a Custom VM
4. When prompted forGuest Operating System Installation, selectI will install the operating system later
5. You can use the default options for almost all the prompts you encounter. For specs, we suggest the following:

• 1 processor / core
• 512 MB of RAM
• NAT Networking

6. When prompted toSelect a Disk, selectUse an existing virtual disk and navigate to the .vmdk you extracted
7. In the end your final screen should look something like this. Click Finish and then power on the VM.

We tried to keep the course fairly self contained but if you find yourself lost or strugglingOverTheWire's Bandit is a great intro to Linux wargames. You can also poke people onIRC if you have questions.

• SSH is pre-setup on the VM, but we need an IP. First, sign in through the VMWare or VirtualBox console. To find the IP address type:
  $ ip addr
  

  

  and then SSH using [PuTTY](http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/latest/x86/putty.exe) or a command line client
  $ ssh lab1C@172.16.29.130
lab1C@172.16.130's password: lab01start
  
• Navigate to/levels/labXX to begin
  $ cd /levels/lab01
• The Warzone is structured like any local privilege escalation wargame.You must exploit a challenge to escalate your privileges and gain access to another user (level).Once you exploit a level and escalate to the next user (confirm withwhoami), read their password from their home dir
  $ cat /home/lab1B/.pass
• SSH in using the new username and password to continue!

• admin user:gameadmin:gameadmin
• lecture user:lecture:lecture
• rc files are in/etc/cfg
  • All lab/project users have symlinks to these files in their home directories
  • These files are also symlinked in/etc/skel
• To begin a lab, login aslabXC:lab0Xstart
  • e.g.lab1C:lab01start
  • Projects areprojectX:projectXstart
• Levels are in/levels
• Passwords are in/home/$USER/.pass
• Tools are installed in/tools and/usr/local/bin
• ASLR must be enabled after completing the DEP/ROP lab, and stay enabled for the rest of the course
  • Until reboot:# echo 2 > /proc/sys/kernel/randomize_va_space
  • Persist reboot:# echo 'kernel.randomize_va_space = 2' > /etc/sysctl.d/01-disable-aslr.conf

We have provided a bash script that will fully setup the exact environment in the provided VM.

DO NOT RUN THIS SCRIPT ON YOUR PERSONAL COMPUTER, RUN IT IN A VIRTUAL MACHINE

1. DownloadMBE_release.tar.gz
2. Move the archive to your VM or machine and extract it
   NOTE: It is not recommended to run the script from /tmp, as the sticky bits can screw up wildcards
   $ tar xzvf MBE_release.tar.gz
3. Modify the configuration variables at the top ofsetup_wargame.sh to suit your needs
4. Make the setup script executable and run it with sudo
   $ chmod +x ./setup_wargame.sh
$ sudo ./setup_wargame.sh
   It should take about 10-20 minutes to complete depending on your internet connection and thenumber of Ubuntu updates.

Account names are case sensitive, so please check that you're logging in as lab1C

The warzone marks many files as immutable to prevent users from changing them andruining the game for other players. For example, we don't want the lab2B user todelete its.pass file or/levels files. A few system files, such as/etc/passwd,are also marked immutable.

If you would like to modify or delete these files simply remove the immutable flag

chattr -i filename

We recommend that you add the flag back when you are done making your changes

chattr +i filename

Posting solutions spoils the fun and grind of the game, and as an academic resource it islikely some of these materials may be re-used by other classes in the future. As goes withmost wargames, we would like to ask that you refrain from publicly posting writeups orexploits to the labs and projects.

If you are ever stuck on a problem or have any questions, you're more than welcome toask onIRC.

This was a very hands on course, so almost every lecture we had students slinging GDB commandsor following along with us on screen. The slides were accessory to the lectures and may havegaps or experience brevity at times. With seven of us creating and giving lectures, the slidesand teaching styles vary a bit. We did our best to keep them consistent.

Sadly we did not record any of the lectures, maybe next time.

We're huge fans of reversing / CTF challenges, but reversing is mostly a time problem. Withstudents juggling other classes and work during the school semester, we'd rather them focus onlearning the exploitation techniques without the overhead of reversing every binary.

The 50 students that enrolled had little to no prior computer security experience. The labsare not designed to be novel CTF challenges, they're meant to be more academic examples pacedto crystallize the concepts. Seasoned CTF'ers can probably blow through most of thesechallenges in a day or two.

If XYZ is related to vulnerability research, we're all ears. The course is far from perfectand we are open to hear any feedback for improving it.

There's a lot of interest in having it offered again, so it's being considered for Spring2016. The feedback was almost exclusively positive with the students finding the materialchallenging, but engaging. We've got dozens of ideas on how to make it even better next time.

Play more wargames:

• SmashTheStack IO
• Pwnable KR
• OverTheWire
• Reversing KR
• W3Challs

And when they're happening, playCTFs!

Our club keeps a pretty activeIRC presence. Someone there can probablyanswer your question.

Server:irc.rpis.ecPort:6667, or6697 (SSL)

If you would like a more formal means of communication, you can reach us atcontact [at] rpis.ec

This course was explicitly designed for academic & educational use only. Please keep thisin mind when sharing and distributing our course material. The specific licenses involvedcan be found below.

Lecture Slides

The lectures are covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0International licenseCC BY-NC 4.0.

Code

The code in this repo is covered by the BSD 2-Clause license. You can view this license inLICENSE.

Hundreds of hours and countless all nighters went into the production and execution ofthis course. This section serves to recognize those who made all of this possible.

• Patrick Biernat
• Jeremy Blackthorne
• Alexei Bulazel
• Branden Clark
• Sophia D'Antoine
• Markus Gaasedelen
• Austin Ralls

• TheRPI CS Department for giving us this opportunity and letting us run with it
• Professor Bülent Yener for sponsoring such a course
• Our students who put up with us all semester