Each team should have at least one member who has taken CMPS 340 (Digital Forensics) on it since that course has shown people how to use a variety of security tools such as Wireshark, Nessus and so on. Each team will be designing one flag in the contest. You will have the next several lab weeks up until the midterm to work on your team's flag. Possible flag designs will be discussed in class, but it's up to each team to ultimately decide on what flag they wish to design.
For most flags, you will need to create one or more virtual machines that will house the data and network traffic necessary for the flag to be captured. Most of this lab will focus on teaching you how to use VMware Workstation (installed only in Sci III 315) to create virtual machines. You can also use VMware Player v3.0 with Easy Install to create virtual machines, but you will need to bring your virtual machines onto one of the computers in Sci III 315 for the contest.
Note: Any files saved in the 'student' account home directory will be removed by the nightly cron jobs. A 'cs476' username has been created for this class. Make sure to log off as 'student' and log in as 'cs476' before creating your virtual machines.
Click the VMware icon in the menu bar at the top of the desktop to launch VMware Workstation. Select File->New->Virtual Machine to launch the new virtual machine wizard. Select the 'Typical' machine configuration the click next. The next screen lets you specify where the installation disk is located for the guest OS. Most of you will be installing from an ISO image, so when you go to create your virtual machine, you would Browse to find the appropriate ISO image. Some ISO images for Linux can be found in the isos directory. Additionally, you can download ISOs for Windows from your MSDN-AA account to the local computer. If you do not have an MSDN-AA account, contact Steve Garcia to create one.
After you've selected the installation disk, you need to tell VMware the type of OS that you'll be installing. Be as specific as possible so VMware can make appropriate virtualized hardware recommendations then click Next. This screen lets you give a name to your virtual machine and set the location to save the virtual machine. Rename it from the default to something that has meaning for your flag.
The next screen lets you set the size of the virtual machine's disk. Make sure you make the disk large enough to install and configure the operating system. Since we have Linux hosts, you can select "Store virtual disk as a single file". On the next screen, the default hardware recommendations based off the guest OS type will be presented. You can click "Customize Hardware" to change these recommendations. If you want this virtual machine to run servers, you will need to customize the hardware and change the network adapter to "Bridged". You might also want to increase the amount of memory allocated to the virtual machine. When you are done customizing the hardware, click Finish and your virtual machine will be created and powered on.
At this point, you will need to go about the tasks of installing and configuring the operating system for your virtual machine. You will have to partition and format the virtual disk just as you would a real disk. Follow the installation prompts for your chosen operating system.