CS 4293 Topics on Cybersecurity

2021/22 Semester B

Environment Setup

In this course, most of our hands-on assignments will be adapted from the project collections on the SEED (Developing Instructional Laboratories for Computer SEcurity EDucation) website (http://www.cis.syr.edu/~wedu/seed/index.html). You are strongly suggested to follow the guidelines to setup your own hands-on environment before doing your assignments. The environment includes the virtual machine software, e.g., VirtualBox and Linux, with which you can work on the assignments using your own personal computers. Getting familiar with them is critical.

Preliminaries:

Above is an illustration figure for cloud hosted virtual machines. In our labs and assignments, we also need to use a Hypervisor Software (VirtualBox) and an OS 1 image which is pre-configured. Within this OS 1 image, we can exploit the vulnerabilities without worrying affecting the hosted OS, achieving sandbox isolation.

1. Prepare the Virtual Machine Software: 

VirtualBox is recommended for the assignment in this course, which is open-source and completely free. We recommend Version 6.1.16 (please stay away from the newer versions, as they may still have some issues with our VM).  If you are working on your own computer, it can be downloaded here. We note that other virtual machine software like VMware Player and Parallels Desktop are also compatible to use.

Go to the download page shown as below and choose the appropriate installation package according to your host operating system:

For instance, students who prefer to work on their MAC laptops should select VirtualBox for OS X hosts.

NOTE:

To make Virtualbox work on all platforms, you need to enable x86 virtualization technology. On x86-based Mac, it is enabled by default. On windows, you need to enable Intel VT-x option in the BIOS settings (similarly SVM on AMD platform).

2. Prepare the Pre-built Ubuntu Virtual Hard Disk File (Optional):

To use the pre-built Ubuntu image, we basically need to create a guest OS image (Ubuntu 64 bit) that is stored on the hosted computer and load the pre-built virtual hard disk file.

In CS Lab Room 2450, the pre-built Ubuntu virtual hard disk files are already prepared.

You can find them in the directory “C:\VirtualBoxVM\CS4293\SEEDUbuntu-20.04-64bit”. The virtual hard disk files are ended with the extension “.vdi”. You can also find 32-bit version but you do not need them in this course.

If you are working on your own computer, a pre-built Ubuntu 16.04 virtual machine image (SEEDUbuntu 20.04.zip) can be downloaded from Google Drive (4 GB).

3. Install Pre-built Ubuntu 20.04 VM image on VirtualBox:

A detailed document from SEED regarding the configuration of the pre-built VM is available at the SEED site (Manual). It gives a more detailed overview of all the installation procedures. Note that some of them might not be necessary for this course (e.g.,  Step 5.d: Network).

Open VirtualBox:

1. Find the shortcut to VirtualBox using CS Lab Menu (if you are in CS Lab Room 2450) or Install VirtualBox Manager using the downloaded installer (if you are working on your own computer).

2. Launch VirtualBox.

3. Launch the Ubuntu image from VirtualBox by clicking “New”:

You should see a screen similar to the following:

Our prebuilt Ubuntu 20.04 VM is 64-bit, so pick Ubuntu (64-bit). Name the VM, select the type as Linux and then continue: 

We need to allocate dedicated memory for the VM. 1024 MB should be sufficient, but we recommend 2GB. If your computer has more RAM, you can increase accordingly. The more memory you give to the VM, the better the performance you will get.

Click the folder image. On the popup window, use the Add button to select the .vdi file provided in C:\VirtualBoxVM\CS4293...

Note: If you get an error message saying that the UUID already exists, this is because the UUID in the selected vdi file is the same as the one used by an existing VM. You can either remove the other VM or change the UUID in the vdi file.

After the previous step, your VM will be created, and you will see it on VirtualBox's VM panel. We need to do some further configuration. Click the Settings option, and we will see the Settings window.

Go to the General category, and select the Advanced tab. Select Bidirectional for both items. The first item allows users to copy and paste between the VM and the host computer The second item allows users to transfer files between the VM and the host computer using Drag'n Drop (this feature is not always reliable).

The copy-and-paste feature is very useful. If you can't do copy and paste, chances are that you forgot to do this step. You can always do it later by selecting the Devices menu item, and you will see the Shared Clipboard submenu.

Note: For some reason, on particular platforms like Windows, some bugs do exist such that you cannot successfully enabled bidirectional support. But you can still use the network within the guest SEEDUbuntu image, e.g., download materials from canvas and transfer files to the host through Whatsapp. 

Go to the System category, and select the Processor tab. Assign number of CPUs to this VM if you prefer. Although may be sufficient, if the performance seems to be an issue, increase the number.

Go to the Display category, and select the Screen tab. If the display does not seem to work properly, try to increase the amount of video memory. In our testing, 28 MB seems to be sufficient.

Note 1: Make sure to select VMSVGA, as choosing other graphic controllers may lead to the crash of the VM.

Note 2: If your computer's screen resolution is too high, the VM may not be able to match the high resolution. As results, your VM will be very small on your screen. To make it bigger, adjust the Scale Factor in this setting.

We can now start the VM. You can also use the Take button to take a snapshot of your VM. This way, if something goes wrong, you can roll back the state of your VM using the saved snapshots.

There are many ways to stop the VM. The best way is to use the Save State. This is different from shutting down the VM. It saves the current VM state, so next time when you restart the VM, the state will be recovered. Moreover, the speed is also faster than booting up a VM.

Sometimes, we need to copy files between the host machine and the VM.

Step A. First you need to create a folder on your local computer (or using an existing folder). We will let the VirtualBox know that this folder should be shared with the VM. Go to the following menus:

Once you see a Add Share popup window, select the folder that you want to share, click OK, and you will see that the folder is now made available for sharing.

Step B. Inside the VM, we need to mount the shared folder somewhere. Let's mount it to the home directory as a folder Share. We will create a folder called Share in the home directory, and then mount the shared folder VM_Shared to this Share folder using the following command. After that, you can access the shared folder from ~/Share.

$ mkdir -p ~/Share

$ sudo mount -t vboxsf VM_Shared ~/Share

Important Note. Please only use the shared folder to copy files between the VM and the host machine, and never use it as your working folder!!! Working from the shared folder has caused many problems, especially on the permissions of the files created inside the shared folder. For example, if we unzip the Labsetup.zip file inside the shared folder, the permissions of the unzipped files will be different from those on the original files. Some labs and containers are very sensitive to those permissions.