$ cat ~/work/computer-security.md
project · security · 2025
Attack and Defense Lab
Exploitation, detection, VPNs and applied cryptography on isolated targets
Ten hands-on exercises: memory-safety defenses, access control, exploitation frameworks, IDS rules, VPNs, AES modes, hashing and MACs, packet analysis, network-protocol attacks and passive ICS mapping.
- kind
- project
- course
- ECE 4115, Georgia Tech
- category
- security
- period
- 2025
- status
- completed
head -n 20 README
Ten exercises against isolated targets in containerized Labtainers environments, each pairing an attack with the defense that counters it. About half of them are applied cryptography.
The offensive labs moved from memory-safety and stack defenses to compromising a deliberately vulnerable lab VM with an exploitation framework through several distinct service weaknesses, and then to network-protocol attacks in an isolated lab: SYN flooding, connection resets and session hijacking. The defensive and analysis labs covered Linux access-control lists and a Trojan-horse scenario, intrusion-detection rules and the confirmation that encrypted traffic defeats content inspection, host-to-host and host-to-gateway VPN tunnels, and passive mapping of an industrial-control network from a packet capture. The cryptography labs demonstrated AES mode weaknesses by encrypting an image in ECB and CBC, showed the avalanche effect, measured how the cost of a partial hash match grows with every extra hex digit, and exercised HMAC. Every target and address was lab-internal.
grep -n highlights
- 01Compromised a deliberately vulnerable lab VM through several distinct service weaknesses with a standard exploitation framework, after enumerating it with a full port scan.
- 02Studied memory-safety defenses hands-on: address-space layout randomisation, stack canaries and a non-executable stack.
- 03Wrote intrusion-detection rules, including content and source-based alerts, and confirmed that TLS defeats payload inspection.
- 04Demonstrated AES mode weaknesses by encrypting an image in ECB versus CBC, and measured how partial hash-match cost grows with each extra hex digit.
- 05Stood up host-to-host and host-to-gateway VPN tunnels and verified the cleartext-to-encrypted transition on the wire.
- 06Mapped an industrial-control network passively from a packet capture, then correlated it in Wireshark.