Contribute with your Plugins!
DVL is designed as a Plugin Framework. This means that you are able to contribute your own plugins to the project. Any tools you want to have added? As source or binary? Or do you have developed new exciting challenges? Or found a vulnerable application which should be added? Extend DVL as you like and share your plugin with the DVL community!
I will publish the “DVL Plugin Guidelines” soon to make plugin development easier for you.
Submit your plugins or applications you like to have added directly to info (att) damnvulnerablelinux.org. We place it into our internal tracker and publish it as fast as we can.
Peace
Subproject “Ten Slides”
Now that DVL Strychnine is available it is time to concentrate of the training material. The subproject “Ten Slides” will publish frequently short eLectures consisting of 10 presentation slides giving background information on a specific topic.
Due our past tests slides will be done with CG speech which is dialect free and better understandable for non-native english speakers / listeners.
We will start with “Ten Slides on ASLR”, next slides depend on interest or ad-hoc decisions. If everything runs fine we will integrate specific community members to produce frequently short lessons.
Stay tuned…
DVL and the ASLR
Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) is a method to prevent attacks like shellcode injection. DVL is now based on a 2.6 kernel which has ASLR enabled (since 2.6.20). This means that it is more complicated to train buffer overflows than with DVL 1.0 or 1.1 based on DSL with a Kernel 2.4. This makes it more realistic but not easier for newbies. But I believe that this forces trainees to think more instead of just to transcribe ready made material.
I will prepare an eLecture on the topic of ASLR combined with a real life example as video training as soon as possible.
As I believe DVL (BT 2.0) has PaX integrated but I am not sure about this - I missed to investigate this. So this is my Call for Contribution to the community: help to solve this problem 
BTW: If you are interested in how to bypass e.g. the PaX ASLR protection you should have a look at Phrack 59-0×09.
Seeds…
After some minor problems on how to publish a Torrent (never published before), the Torrent starts to get seeded! Some community members help to seed, so thanks to them.
DVL is now my no. 1 project with an amazing rate of visitors.
One week of rest, then first videos will follow on how to play with DVL and its tools.
This is a call to the community: please provide training videos (swf format) to let this community project grow. It is not necessary to provide sound but would be better to have i!
It is your project, so make it to the best!
Damn Vulnerable Linux Strychnine - Success Story during two university lectures!
Damn Vulnerable Linux has been succesfuly used during two university lectures (University of Hannover and University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hannover).Β During the lectures DVL has been used to teach Buffer Overflow Analysis and Exploitation and Web Security. Additional it has been used as training environment to teach assembly language to-down using HLA (High Level Assembly). I have to say thank you to the students being good testers and for that they had really fun to learn assembly language with DVL.
DVL Strychnine final! Available very soon via BitTorrent (following via mirrors)
DVL Strychnine is finally final. The last pre-compilation is running at the moment, then the final compilation of the remaster will follow. Some nasty bugs fixed such as permissions problems of the pre-installed MySQL database containing first vulnerabe web examples. Click on the link below to see the current changelog. This shows you which additions have been added to the “classic” BT 2.0 release to build the base of the new era of Damn Vulnerable Linux. Some more minor unimportant features are left to install, however I believe it is time to go with the release to concentrate finally on the production of the most important: training lessons!
DVL Strychnine will be available via BitTorrent this weekend (never published before using BitTorrent… let’s see if I run into problems…) - Later I place it on the mirrors. File size at the moment 822 MB, sorry for that but let the community decide what to kill!
A short intro video will follow soon, maybe I can make it this weekend.
step mode on in GDB (by Stingduk)
I stepped halfway through the scanf function until I tried “finish” (which also failed to stop when it was outside the call once and just ended the run after my text was entered.)
use set step mode on
DVL Strychnine Cheat Codes
DVL Strychnine is based on BT2. These are the cheat codes which you can use to enable specific features in DVL Strychnine:
Useful Commands:
β? ati β initializes the ATI Xconf and starts KDE.
β? startx β starts KDE.
β? flux β starts Fluxbox.
β? share β mounts a windows share to /mnt/share.
β? leetmode β starts a KDE Sensor array (karamba) .
β? start-kismet-ng β auto configures kismet.conf and runs kismet.
β? fixvesa β restore original vesa xconf (not in beta).
β? sshd-generate β creates SSH Keys. Usually followed by /usr/sbin/sshd.
Cheat Codes:
β? bt β default boot.
β? dbt β dual core support (default boot has dual core disabled).
β? safe β loads BT with a failsafe configuration.
β? debug β load BT in DEBUG mode.
β? client β PXE boot cracking client (not in beta).
β? server β PXE boot cracking server (not in beta).
Taken from http://offensive-security.com/documentation/backtrack-intro.pdf
DVL Strychnine Beta (non-public) ready to go…
DVL Strychnine Beta is now finished. The beta will be available for the beta testers (please do not ask for beta testing) and the ISO will be tested and shown during 2 university lectures next week. ISO size now at 800 MB, without removing KDE there is few chance only to reduce the size significant. Let the community decide how to decrease size… I am sure we will release before June 10th!
DVL Strychnine - Timeline
After solving nearly all problems - some few less important tools still have broken dependencies - it is time to set the new release dates:
20.05.2007 - finalization DVL Strychnine Beta (non-public)
27.05.2007 - last bug fixes done
First week of june - DVL Strychnine goes public, mirrors will be setup
what is done this weekend:
documentation will be added and the size will be reduced
with release I will publish a new introductionary video.
what will happen next? The next DVL (E605) will contain some few more tools and tool updates. With E605 we will have our focus - finally - on the training part, which means tutorials and training videos explaining tools and methods. I like a complete ISO but with videos included we might move to DVD size…
The True Story of Hello World (or at least a good part of it)
Playing with DVL Strychnine I stumbled upon an error using HLA Assembly. Googling around to solve the problem I found the solution and the following nice Hello World tutorial…
DVL Strychnine Alpha finished…
well, well, well… One weekend of work and the DVL Strychnine Alpha is finished. Some hairs went grey, but I control the remastering process. Current ISO size annoying 745 MB but I will reduce it shameless to a much smaller size. Some more tools which make currently some trouble and documentation and we will move to Beta. During this week I will test the Alpha with my students showing them a buffer overflow analysis… I start to like this remastering!
Strychnine faster than I thought
The installation of the tools is faster than I thought. Some tools still make trouble to install, but the progress looks good!
DVL Finally Delayed - The One-Man-Army is back…
First I have to say that I am sorry that we did not made - again - the promisedΒ DVL Black Hat available at the promised time.
The current “Black Hat” edition has some bugs which have not been fixed yet. One (important) bug is that Metasploit does not run correctly under the DSL solution.
With this it is time to make a final decision:
We will skip the DVL Black Hat release and move to “Damn Vulnerable Linux Strychnine”. With this we will face very significant changes of the system. We will replace the DSL core system with the one offered by BackTrack2, which is one of the best distros out there at the moment. However, BackTrack is not sufficient for our needs
So what is the current status? I have installed the first tools, and the training packages. More tools will come (something around 30 to 50 more than BackTrack2 offers). Documentation is prepared and is waiting to be added. The BT2 ISO size will be reduced significant. Several vulnerable applications (web and binary) are waiting to be installed. With this all sources will be installed as well at Strychnine.
Additional I am thinking about an own forum for DVL to have a better integration of the DVL community.
BTW: we have around 500 unique visitors per day which shows we are on the good path!
The “One-Man-Army” is back… I will do the release as fast as I can, but I expect that the install process takes something around 6 more weeks… sorry for that, but my time is limited…
back to work…