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-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 is the configuration of the bank service offered by the server, whereas expgroups 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 

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