OWASP Hackademic Challenges project

The OWASP Hackademic Challenge project helps you test your knowledge on web application security. You can use it to actually attack web applications in a realistic but also controllable and safe environment.

The latest stable version is in next branch, the development version is in next-dev.

Description

The Hackademic challenges implement realistic scenarios with known vulnerabilities in a safe, controllable environment. Users can attempt to discover and exploit these vulnerabilities in order to learn important concepts of information security through the attacker's perspective.

Currently, there are 10 scenarios available.

You can choose to start from the one that you find most appealing, although we suggest to follow the order presented on the first page. We intend to expand the available challenges with additional scenarios that involve cryptography and even vulnerable systems implemented in downloadable virtual machines.

Deployment

Dependencies of Hackademic involve a web server (Apache, nginx) with PHP and Mysql/MariaDB connected with it. Make sure you have installed these before you start deploying Hackademic. We recommand to use Apache with MySQL. See Digital Ocean's website for a good tutorial under Ubunt. See WampServer to set up the environnement under Windows.

Clone Hackademic project,

git clone https://github.com/Hackademic/hackademic.git

After successful cloning of the Hackademic project, copy the contents into /var/www We need to change the permissions of the file now,

sudo chmod -R 765 hackademic

Ensure that the Apache is started and SQL connection is also active. Point your browser towards http://127.0.0.1/ You will be prompted with Hackademic page. In case you have many sub-directories in /var/www/, the browser would throw up all the directories. Choose hackademic from that.

Now you will be prompted to Hackademic installation page. Be sure to fill out all the fields.

1. Administrator Details

   Fill any email id, username and password. You will using this username and password, later to log in to hackademic.

2. Database Settings

   Fill the database name, database host, database username and password.

3. Configuration Settings

   All the fields are preloaded with information. Go to next level.

4. Finish

   On finish, you should get a success message. Open the URL it suggests. You should be able to log in.

After finish stage if you got a error

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '[' in /var/www/hackademic/model/common/class.ChallengeAttempts.php on line 363']'

update the version of PHP you are using. Hackademic uses 5.4+.

Road Map and Getting Involved

We maintain an up to date list of open issues on the platform on our issues

For a list of features we would like implemented you can see either the issues page or our Google Summer Of Code ideas page

Involvement in the development and promotion of the Hackademic Challenges is actively encouraged! You do not have to be a security expert in order to contribute. Some of the ways you can help:

• Write Documentation
• Write Unit tests
• Develop themes and plugins
• Write Challenges or Articles or contribute security courses

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for installation guidelines and other developer-oriented explanations.

Contact Us

Feel free to connect with us over #hackademic-dev channel on Freenode. We also run a mailing list which is owasp-hackademic-challenges@lists.owasp.org that you can join here.