72 lines
4.7 KiB
TeX
72 lines
4.7 KiB
TeX
\chapter{Introduction}
|
|
|
|
As the world is being completely engulfed by software, the need for accessible, but
|
|
high quality learning materials on software engineering and especially secure software
|
|
engineering is on the rise.
|
|
While we are enjoying the comfort that information technology provides us, we often forget
|
|
about the risks involved in relying so much on software in our everyday lives.
|
|
When taking a look on recent events, such as a cyber arms race taking place between leading
|
|
powers, 50 million Facebook accounts being breached
|
|
due to the incorrect handling of access tokens, or how China is building an Orwellian state
|
|
of total digital surveillance it becomes clear that security and privacy in the IT sector
|
|
is more important now than ever.
|
|
|
|
With all of our data slowly crawling towards the cloud and an IoT revolution on our necks,
|
|
we as an industry must face the music and start actually doing something before we enter
|
|
a new age of digital wild west.
|
|
Unless we want to disconnect all our devices from all networks and ban USB sticks, the best
|
|
lines of defense are going to be people -- a new generation of \emph{security conscious} users and
|
|
developers.
|
|
|
|
The goal of Avatao as a company is to help software developers in building a \emph{culture} of
|
|
security amongst themselves, with the vision that if the world is going to be taken over by
|
|
software no matter what, that software might as well be \emph{secure software}.
|
|
Unless we want to run around in vulnerable self driving cars while exposing all our sensitive
|
|
data through our ill-protected smart phones that is.
|
|
To achieve this goal we have been working on an online e-learning platform with hundreds\
|
|
\footnote{654 exercises as of today, to be exact}
|
|
of hands-on learning exercises to help students and professionals
|
|
master IT security, collaborating with
|
|
universities around the world and providing a solution for companies in building
|
|
\emph{security consciousness} amongst their developer teams.
|
|
|
|
Since starting out we have amassed some experience in building fun challenges and tutorials
|
|
that showcase the exploitation and fixing of relevant security vulnerabilites in code or
|
|
configuration.
|
|
Traditionally these exercises revolved around offensive and defensive tasks, with challenges
|
|
often being split into two or more parts.
|
|
For example users would have to hack a website by exploiting a buffer overflow vulnerability,
|
|
then in the second challenge they would fix the code they've just exploited in a web based
|
|
code editor.
|
|
These kind of exercises offer great flexibility to reflect real world security issues, as in
|
|
more complex challenges users might be required to exploit multiple vulnerabilites for success,
|
|
and understand the ways they augment each other.
|
|
We often recreate real world scenarios based on incident reports released by companies for
|
|
added authenticity and relevance \cite{AkosFacebook}.
|
|
Our challenges usually involve some sort of website acting as frontend for the vulnerable
|
|
application, or require the user to connect to a server using SSH.
|
|
|
|
While working as a content creator I have stumbled into the idea of automating the completion
|
|
of challenges for QA\footnote{Quality assurrance} and demo purposes\
|
|
\footnote{I used to record short videos or GIFs to showcase my content to management}.
|
|
In a certain scenario I was required to integrate a web based terminal emulator in a
|
|
frontend application to improve user experience by making it possible to use a terminal
|
|
right on the website rather than having to connect through SSH.
|
|
After I got this working I was looking into writing hacky bash scripts to automate the steps
|
|
required to complete the challenge in order to make it easier for me to record the solution,
|
|
as I have often found myself recording over and over for a demo without any mistakes.
|
|
During the time I was playing around with this idea, researching possible solutions I've found
|
|
a hidden gem of a project on GitHub called \emph{demo-magic}\
|
|
\footnote{\href{https://github.com/paxtonhare/demo-magic}{https://github.com/paxtonhare/demo-magic}},
|
|
which is esentially a bash script that simulates someone typing into a terminal and executing
|
|
commands.
|
|
I have created a fork of the project and integrated it into my challenge.
|
|
Soon after recording demo videos was not even necessary anymore, as I have started to distribute
|
|
the solution script with the challenge code itself, making it toggleable using build-time
|
|
variables.
|
|
|
|
I was quite pleased with myself, no longer having to do the busywork of recording videos,
|
|
but what I did not know was that I have accidentally
|
|
did something far more than a hacky bash script solving my challenges, as this little script
|
|
was the basis of the idea for the project we call \emph{Tutorial Framework} or just \emph{TFW}.
|