Challenges

Lab start: 20.10.2011 after the lecture.

During the InetSec 2 course, we will announce a "challenge" here every couple of weeks that you need to solve. These challenges aim to allow you to gain practical experience in the penetration testing and the vulnerability analysis of software and applications. We have planned a set of challenges that deal with topics such as application vulnerabilities, buffer and heap overflows, viruses, application cracking and spoofing. The challenges are directly related to the concepts discussed in the lecture.

In order to successfully pass the Advanced InetSec course, you have to achieve at least 50% for the challenges and 50% for the exam. Each challenge you solve will give you 20% , so we require you to solve at least 3 challenges to be admitted to the written exam. The written exam at the end of the semester consists of 50 possible points. Suppose John Student, for example, solves 5 challenges and manages to get 35 points (70%) in the written exam. John will get a total of: (70+100)/2=85% for the course.

To get the maximum percentage for the practical part of the course, you need to successfully solve at least 5 challenges. The 6th challenge will give you an additional bonus of 10%.

These callenges are not necessarily difficult (for advanced programmers), but will probably require you to do research on the Internet, reading of documentation, patience, endurance and coding.

This is supposed to be fun for us too (;-)) so if we manage to find out your password during the course (e.g., crack your password), you will be "punished". So start by changing your password and follow the instructions on this Web site.

By the way, we are aware that the InetSec environment is not highly secure. It is quite a challenge to make an environment vulnerable enough but not too vulnerable. So we trust you that you will not try to break or hack the system. That is not a challenge. If we notice that you are trying to crack us, there will be consequences - be warned :-)

Good luck and happy debugging ;-)