CTF Challenges & Vuln App Lab
Overview
Welcome to the CTF (Capture The Flag) Challenges & Vulnerable App Lab section of the AppSec Atlas. This module is designed to provide hands-on, practical experience in exploiting and securing modern applications. The labs cover a wide range of vulnerabilities, spanning traditional web applications, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and emerging AI/ML systems.
Prerequisites
Before beginning the labs in this module, you should have a solid understanding of:
- Basic web application architecture (HTTP, APIs, Frontend/Backend).
- Common vulnerability classes (e.g., OWASP Top 10).
- Basic scripting skills (Python is preferred).
- Containerization and infrastructure (Docker, Docker Compose, Terraform basics).
Learning Objectives
By completing these hands-on challenges, you will be able to:
- Identify critical vulnerabilities in source code and configurations.
- Exploit security flaws safely in a contained, local environment to understand their impact.
- Remediate the identified vulnerabilities by implementing secure coding practices and configuration hardening.
- Automate the detection and exploitation of vulnerabilities using scripts.
Navigation
This chapter is divided into the following sections:
- 01 Introduction & Setup: Setting up the vulnerable lab environment.
- 02 Web Vulnerabilities Lab: Challenges for traditional web flaws (SQLi, XSS, SSRF, etc.).
- 03 API Vulnerabilities Lab: Challenges targeting REST and GraphQL APIs.
- 04 AI & ML Vulnerabilities Lab: Novel attacks against LLMs and RAG systems.
- 05 Cloud & IaC Vulnerabilities Lab: Misconfigurations in Docker and Terraform.
- 06 Hands-on Full Stack Lab: A comprehensive, multi-stage vulnerable application.
- 07 References: Additional resources and external labs for further practice.