This exercise requires basic OS and networking knowledge, understanding of Denial of Service (DoS) and buffer overflows. It also involves coding skills. It can be done in introductory and advanced security classes.

Before the exercise you need to perform the following steps:

1. Create groups of students in your class project on DETERLab, one group per attack team. Give to the groups easily related names (e.g., “cctf-exper1-team1”) since managing multiple copies of experiment and multiple teams could easily get confusing.
2. Swap in the experiment using the related NS file:

    /share/education/CTF2_USC/ctf2.ns 

   Swap in as many experiments as you have teams. For each experiment, the obtained network template is described in the following picture.

3. For each topology created, remove access to the three client machines for all but their attack team, and remove access to server and gateway machine for all but the automated defense team. Remove also the access to router for all teams. These steps can be done by running the setexpgroups.sh script:

   $ ./setexpgroups.sh ProjName expgroups mysql

   where mysql (contained in the local folder setups/) is the configuration of the bank service offered by the server, whereas expgroups (contained in the local folder groups/) is a text file which specifies, by means of its two lines, the names of the experiments and the associated group names. An example the expgroups file is shown down here.

   exp1 exp2 
   exp1-attack-group exp1-defense-group exp2-attack-group exp2-defense-group 

<REPLY BEGIN: THE LAST STEP IS NOT CLEAR. WHICH IS THE SEMANTICS OF THE SECOND LINE?>

In this specific case, we declare in the first line the experiment ID, and the list of the respective attack and defense groups. Therefore, the experiment exp1 contains the attack group exp1-attack-group and the defense group, meanwhile the experiment exp2 is related to the attack group exp2-attack-group and the defense group exp2-defense-group.

<REPLY END: THE LAST STEP IS NOT CLEAR. WHICH IS THE SEMANTICS OF THE SECOND LINE?>

This step will ensure that during exercise team members cannot log into machines controlled by the opposing team and spy on them.