Why Is Attack Lab Good?

(by @jiegec)

Attack Lab is a lab from CMU 15-213 Computer Systems Intro, where students experience code-injection attacks; it's widely praised.

In offline exchanges, we discussed its strengths and how to borrow them into our own assignments. What's listed here is only a teaser — copying existing overseas labs isn't enough; combined with teaching needs, we often need to design our own assignments.

Clear learning goals

It states at the very beginning what abilities are trained, so students feel gains beyond the grade.

This assignment involves generating a total of five attacks on two programs having different security vulnerabilities. Outcomes you will gain from this lab include:

• You will learn different ways that attackers can exploit security vulnerabilities when programs do not safeguard themselves well enough against buffer overflows.
• Through this, you will get a better understanding of how to write programs that are more secure, as well as some of the features provided by compilers and operating systems to make programs less vulnerable.
• You will gain a deeper understanding of the stack and parameter-passing mechanisms of x86-64 machine code.
• You will gain a deeper understanding of how x86-64 instructions are encoded.
• You will gain more experience with debugging tools such as GDB and OBJDUMP.

Step by step

Split into multiple steps, grade per step, with content dependency and difficulty progression between steps.

Phase	Program	Level	Method	Function	Points
1	CTARGET	1	CI	touch1	10
2	CTARGET	2	CI	touch2	25
3	CTARGET	3	CI	touch3	25
4	RTARGET	2	ROP	touch2	35
5	RTARGET	3	ROP	touch3	5

Complete documentation

• Teaching purpose
• How to get started
• Expected input/output
• Common problems and solutions

Fun

• Mastering the skill of attacking software
• Things that once seemed hard, you find you can do after learning
• A huge sense of achievement
• Besides a high score, is there another motivation?