Creation of network exploitation CTF challenges with the help of Containernet project
Nõmmsalu, Rain (2024)
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2024052716537
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2024052716537
Tiivistelmä
Capture The Flag (CTF) cybersecurity trainings and competitions are a great way to learn and improve various IT and cybersecurity topics. Hosting a CTF competition for hundreds of participants can be a complex challenge. Compute resource requirements can be very high as each participant needs to have its own set of challenges to use. A regular competition can have tens of web servers and many network services for exploitation and hardening.
Using a container-based infrastructure for hosting the challenges can help manage compute resource usage but may limit the types of challenges that can be provided to the players. The purpose of this thesis was to explore how the Containernet project can help in creating complex network topologies within a single virtual machine for network attack CTF challenge creation.
The thesis demonstrated that it is possible to create extensive network topologies using the Containernet project, which allows for the addition of Docker-based containers to the mininet emulated network topologies, making the challenges more realistic.
Using a container-based infrastructure for hosting the challenges can help manage compute resource usage but may limit the types of challenges that can be provided to the players. The purpose of this thesis was to explore how the Containernet project can help in creating complex network topologies within a single virtual machine for network attack CTF challenge creation.
The thesis demonstrated that it is possible to create extensive network topologies using the Containernet project, which allows for the addition of Docker-based containers to the mininet emulated network topologies, making the challenges more realistic.