Lab 0: Intro to pwn.college and Bash Refresher

Setting Up pwn.college

pwn.college is a cybersecurity (CySec) education platform created by CySec researchers and educators at Arizona State University.

It takes a gamified, hands-on approach to learning CySec findamentals by providing a series of increasingly difficult capture-the-flag (CTF) challenges based on various topics and concepts in security.

Throughout the semester, your labs will consist of a selection of challenges relevant to our course material. You will also be able to complete other challenges for extra credit.

Interacting with the Dojo

Once you have joined the course dojo, you should be able open it and view the available modules.

Open the lab0 module, which contains the challenges for this week’s lab.

There are a lot of challenges, but don’t worry! Almost of all of them are quite fast to complete (1-2 min each) and generally only require running a few commands in your terminal.

How does this work?

The first 6 challenges under the header “Interacting with the Dojo” are designed to introduce you to the Dojo environment.

Each Capture-the-Flag (CTF) challenge takes place in a sandboxed Linux environment. The dojo provides several means of interacting with it:

  • an in-browser terminal
  • an in-browser Visual Studio Code instance
  • an in-browser remote desktop viewer
  • ssh from your machine’s terminal

For each challenge:

  1. click on the challenge name to expand it
  2. read the instructions (if present)
  3. click start to initialize the challange instance
  4. complete the challenge

Crash Course: Linux & Bash

As you might have guessed, completing challenges on pwn.college requires some familiarity with Linux and bash.

The next series of challenges are meant to be a basic refresher for both. There will be more exercises to get you comfortable in the challenge environment over the next couple of weeks.

The Challenge Environment

Now that you can access the challenge, and are comfortable in Linux, you are ready to tackle some CTFs!

These challenges will introduce the format that pwn.college CTFs take.

Final Note

Lab completion is automatically logged in pwn.college, so you generally won’t be required to submit anything else.

If you still feel a little uncomfortable with Linux, we strongly advise you to follow pwn.college’s recommendation and work through the Linux Luminarium dojo to get some more practice!