CMPS 476 - Lab 1

Lab 1 - Team Selection

In this lab, you will form 1-4 person teams for the capture the flag contest. There is no write-up for this lab, but do tell me the members of your team so I can record that.

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 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. The isolated network will be used to house the virtual machines. It uses VMware vSphere 4. Each team will have an account created on the system that will allow you to set up virtual machines.

To ensure fairness, each team will be limited to no more than 20% CPU resources at peak and 24GB RAM between all virtual machines. The teams will also be limited to 250GB of disk space for each team. Make sure to keep these limitations in mind when designing your virtual machines.

Once your team has its account, you will need to select a time to use the isolated network in Sci III 314 to install your virtual machines. You may use VMware Workstation in Sci III 315 to do preliminary design and testing for your team's machines. The account 'cs476' with the password 'cs476' has been set up to allow such testing. Keep in mind that any other team could log in to the machine and access the cs476 account, so you may wish to only use 315 to become familiar with VMware in general.

Ground Rules for Using Sci III 314

You may not attempt to interfer with the isolated network infrastructure or with any of the workstations in the room. This includes attempting to log in as anything other than your team login (or 'student' login), attacks against the machines, and so forth. The isolated network infrastructure is located in the IP address range of 192.168.100.1 to 192.168.100.40.
You may not connect laptops to the isolated network. If you need to transfer data from the Internet to the isolated network, a few 8GB USB drives are available for such purposes.
You may not enter the secured area containing the wiring rack and isolated network rack without explicit permission from Dr. Danforth or Steve Garcia.
You must follow the professional ethics standards that will be discussed Monday April 9th in class. In brief, all skills learned in this course and all research conducted for your final project must be applied in a legal and ethical manner. We want you in the headlines for good reasons, not bad ones.

Time Slots for Sci III 314

The specific number of time slots per week will depend on the number of teams that sign up this week. The lab will comfortably seat 7 students at one time, which will allow 2 or 3 teams to be installing machines simultaneously. You will want to plan your installation and setup in more private settings to prevent any inadvertent leaks of information about your team's network.

The lab will be available on Tuesdays from 12:20 to 5:40, during Dr. Danforth's office hours on MWF and on Thursdays by appointment. Teams that cannot make any one of these times can see Dr. Danforth about an appointment for another time.