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Challenge resources

This repository contains instructions to setup a ready-to-go challenge environment on Coder. This file contains full instructions to setup your environment and get started with a challenge.

  1. Coder instance setup
  2. Getting started with your Coder instance
  3. Running a challenge

Coder instance setup

Connect to https://coder.trailofbits.network/ to create a new Coder workspace. When you set up a new Coder instance, it will ask you a series of questions about provisioning.

  • We suggest configuring your instance with two vCPUs to start with. You can always reconfigure your instance (instance Workspace -> the three-dot menu in the upper right hand corner to the right of the Favorite button -> Settings) to add more capacity if/as needed
  • The minimum disk space (40G) should be enough to run the challenges
  • In order to set up some basic dependencies (and to pull the challenges from this repo and set them up) provide Coder with the URL of the startup script contained in this repo: 
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/trailofbits/challenge-tasks/refs/heads/main/startup.sh
    (make sure to use the raw githubusercontent.com location, not the html-embedded location from github.com)

Getting started with your Coder instance

Access from your local terminal

If you don't already have it, and want to work in your local terminal, you'll need the coder binary. It will facilitate things like local instance creation and destruction, and ssh to instances. You can obtain a slightly old version of the coder binary from Brew on macOS, or (if you like to live dangerously and blindly run shell scripts you haven't seen before) directly follow the instructions in the Coder documentation.

Then, whenever you create a new instance, you can run the Coder binary to set a local ssh shortname:

coder login # You can skip if you're already authenticated
coder config-ssh

Finally, you can ssh to your coder instance(s) using any of the names Coder added into your SSH config:

ssh coder.<YOUR_INSTANCE_NAME_GOES_HERE>.main

If that doesn't work for you for some reason, the following is equivalent:

ssh <YOUR_CODER_USER_NAME_HERE>@coder.<YOUR_INSTANCE_NAME_GOES_HERE>

since your instance's hostname should be coder.<YOUR_INSTANCE_NAME_GOES_HERE>.

File transfer

scp, rsync, and sftp are all Coder-supported methods of file transfer between your local machine, and your Coder instance, once you have ssh'd to your Coder instance at least once.

GUI (VNC) access

Better ideas/implementations are welcome and appreciated, but we're using x11vnc over ssh for now.

If you are running macOS, vnc-viewer is a free VNC client that is available from Brew. On Linux, there are of course many options. You will need GUI access for several of the web challenges. The startup script sets your instance up with x11, lightdm, and a choice of tigervnc or x11vnc, but doesn't enable vnc by default since you should set a unique password for that.

X11VNC

The following directions are adapted from the Arch wiki.

On your instance either over ssh or through the webshell, set a VNC password for your instance. I generated and stored one in my password manager, then set it locally in /etc/x11vnc.pwd (this file name is important since we'll reference it in the systemd configuration).

Next, create a systemd unit for x11vnc, I suggest in /lib/systemd/system/x11vnc.service. The following unit file contents aren't perfect, but it's a starting point (suggestions welcome):

[Unit]
Description=x11vnc VNC Server
After=multi-user.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/x11vnc -forever -loop -noxdamage -repeat -rfbauth /etc/x11vnc.pwd -rfbport 5900 -shared -o /var/log/x11vnc.log -create -display :0 -env XAUTHORITY=~/.Xauthority
ExecStop=/usr/bin/killall x11vnc
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=2

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Once you have this configuration locally on your Coder instance, enable and start x11vnc, and check status (if it's not active (running), you may need to troubleshoot beyond the scope of this document):

  $ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
  $ sudo systemctl enable x11vnc
  $ sudo systemctl start x11vnc
  $ sudo systemctl status x11vnc

From your own machine, you should now be able to make the ssh tunnel to connect to a new X session via the x11vnc server on your Coder instance:

  ssh -t -L 5900:127.0.0.1:5900 <YOURUSERNAME>@coder.<YOURINSTANCENAME> 'x11vnc -localhost -create -display :0'

Then, just use your VNC client of choice (I'm using VNC Viewer in this example) to connect to localhost:5900 and provide the VNC password you set on your Coder instance when it prompts you!

Access from your browser

You can use the webshell and web VSCode instances available from the page for your Coder workspace. Sometimes the webshell is a little more stable than ssh.

Other

  • Periodic transfer (we suggest only setting this up from the instance to your local machine, should you choose to do this, since Coder shuts down any instances not in use and cron syncs from your local machine to a shut down instance will most likely fail) can be configured with cron if you'd like to autosave your work and/or aren't working in the webshell / web VSCode instance.
  • Link to Coder Docs

Potential Gotchas

  • Coder will take a snapshot of whatever you give it for the startup script when it creates your new instance. This means changes made in this repository will most likely not apply to existing instances unless they are deleted and re-provisioned.
  • Coder may randomly and without warning terminate and restart your instance; you will be able to see this in the uptime notification in the web UI. This may affect you if you are using your local terminal to ssh to your Coder instance. (This doesn't mean you'll lose instance state, but rather that your ssh connections may freeze and need to be restarted.)
  • Coder will not save your shell history by default, unless you have configured this yourself. Whenever you end the ssh connection to your Coder instance, you'll lose your shell history by default.
  • Coder should allow passwordless sudo on your instance, so once you've ssh'd in you should be able to add, install, change, etc. basically anything you need.
  • For the full logs output and/or to see what happened when you need to debug, prefer the saved Coder workspace logs over whatever Coder has printed to your terminal, which may omit some output.
  • The Brew version of the Coder binary may complain about a version mismatch. If you decide to run the shell script it suggests, remove and unlink the Brew version of the coder binary first, or you'll end up with old-and-new parallel installs.

Running a challenge

The challenges directory in this repository contains packaged challenges ready to be run on an x64 machine. It is automatically copied in your home directory in your Coder instance by the startup script. Each directory within challenge contains one single challenge (e.g challenges/challenge-death-note). Inside each challenge directoy, you will find a README.md file with the goal of the challenge and instructions to start/run it.

There is a python virtualenv called venv already configured with useful tools and libraries on your Coder instance.

# On your ToB laptop
coder config-ssh
ssh coder.<YOUR_INSTANCE_NAME_GOES_HERE>

# Now on your Coder instance
$ source venv/bin/activate # Activate venv with some pwn libs
$ cd challenges/challenge-death-note # Access death-note challenge
$ cat README.md # Read challenge instructions