CHAD

This year, many of the challenges are instanced. This means that you'll get your own isolated environment in which to solve them! When you launch a challenge, containers will be created on our servers and you'll connect to them via a VPN.

Setup

Challenges making use of CHAD are easily identifiable by the large "Launch instance" button in the challenge dialog.

  1. Click the button to create containers and an OpenVPN server to connect to your challenges
  2. Download an OpenVPN configuration file by clicking the green button labelled ".ovpn" at the top of the challenges page
  3. Start OpenVPN with the config file on your system (see below for specific details)
  4. Once a connection is established, you should be able to connect to your instance

Note:

  • Keep the challenge description open in your browser, otherwise after a few minutes the instance will be deleted
  • If OpenVPN fails to connect, wait a few seconds and retry
  • It might take a few moments beyond the what the loading spinner suggests for the services in the container(s) for a given challenge to become ready
  • Your devices and all challenge instances will be placed on the same network: 192.168.128.0/17. However, each challenge will only use IP addresses in a /24 subnet of this network. To avoid confusion, only scan / attack addresses in the same range as the main one given in the challenge description. For example, if a server is at 192.168.137.1, you should only be looking at 192.168.137.0/24 (aka 192.168.137.1-192.168.137.254) for that challenge.

Linux

Linux is recommended for CHAD challenges in particular, something like Kali is perfect for CTF's as it comes with a lot of tools pre-installed.

To install OpenVPN:

  • On Ubuntu / Debian (including Kali): sudo apt update && sudo apt install openvpn
  • On Arch: sudo pacman -Syu openvpn
  • On Fedora: sudo dnf install openvpn

Once OpenVPN is installed, simply run sudo openvpn /path/to/HackTrinity_<your user>.ovpn in a terminal. The output should look something like this:

Windows

Download and install OpenVPN for Windows. Make sure "TAP Virtual Ethernet Adapter" is checked in the installer.

Right-click on the downloaded .ovpn file and choose "Start OpenVPN on this config file". The results should look similar to below:

macOS

Get Tunnelblick. Once installed, open the downloaded .ovpn file and install it. When you connect, there may be an issue with loading the TAP kernel extension. See here for a solution.

If you'd like to find out more about how CHAD works, you can look at the source on GitHub. It'll be documented at some point. Probably. If you're having difficulty getting CHAD working, DM us on Twitter or send us an email .