Teaching software vulnerabilities: OWASP SKF Labs

2021-01-28 15:42:00

At one of my previous clients, we taught developers and engineers about a number of common software vulnerabilities through an in-house course. The training makes use of labs provided by OWASP's SKF Labs project

The SKF Labs offer dozens of Dockerized mini-webapps, each of them purpose built to demo one type of vulnerability. They're the exact inverse of demo apps like Juice Shop or DVWA, which combine many different vulns into one webapp. 

The Dockerized apps make it easy to teach a small set of vulns to students: all they need is Docker and a way to pull in the public containers. 

After teaching with these labs, I also wanted to contribute! There were two specific vulnerability types that I wanted to include in our teaching:

Building the first of those apps was easy: just clone one of the existing Dockerized apps and adjust where needed.

The second one was an absolute blast to build, because it forced me to learn new things! I had to practice my Python, I got started with TCP/IP packet crafting in Scapy and I got to learn NetFilter plugins! I learned a lot from a similar project by Ludovic Barman

The TLS downgrade demo is something I'm pretty darn proud of! I learned how to build a Python script which performs a man-in-the-middle attack on TLS, through the abuse of NetFilter plugins and by tweaking TLS packets using Scapy! What a rush!


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