What is Shiva?
Shiva is an Ansible playbook to provision a host to be used for playing CTF games, such as HackTheBox.
Quick start
- Create a Ubuntu 18.04 server host and ensure you have root access via SSH
- Install Ansible on your local machine
- Clone the repository to your local machine:
git clone [email protected]:rastating/shiva.git - Replace
127.0.0.1with the IP address of the host to provision in theubuntu_bionicsection ofinventory.ini - Run the playbook:
ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini -u root -l ubuntu_bionic playbook.yml
Why Shiva and not another Hindu deity?
When playing CTFs, I prefer to use cloud providers (such as Digital Ocean) rather than a local virtual machine running Kali. Although Kali is a great system, I find myself using only a small subset of the available tools and frequently find myself spinning up a cloud instance for persistence purposes anyway.
For this reason, I put together Shiva to automate building hosts in the cloud for pentesting / CTF purposes with my preferred environment. It's not a replacement for distros such as Kali and Parrot, but a way to build a more concise environment for similar purposes.
What operating systems can Shiva be used with?
Currently, Shiva has only been tested against Ubuntu 18.04.
What tools / packages are included?
Several directories can also be found which include pre-compiled binaries and files to aid with exploitation and post-exploitation:
| Path | Description |
|---|---|
/usr/share/linux-binaries |
Pre-compiled Linux binaries for post-exploitation (such as pspy) |
/usr/share/webshells |
Web shells written in several languages |
/usr/share/windows-binaries |
Pre-compiled Windows binaries for post-exploitation (such as Mimikatz) |
/usr/share/wordlists |
Wordlists to be used with password attacks / enumeration |
What services does Shiva expose out of the box?
None; other than SSH. Apache, PostgreSQL and vsftpd are all installed, but the ports are not open to the public by default.
If you want to lock down where SSH is available out of the box, you can run the playbook with the --extra-vars switch to specify the trusted_ssh_ip variable.
For example, running the playbook with ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini -u root -l ubuntu_bionic --extra-vars "trusted_ssh_ip=10.8.0.1" playbook.yml would add a firewall rule that would only allow 10.8.0.1 to connect to port 22 and drop traffic from any other IP address.
Be cautious when doing this, a typo could lead to you locking yourself out!
Does Shiva create any user accounts?
Yes - an account named ftp is created without a default password. This is for use with vsftpd (see next section on connecting to vsftpd) but cannot be used to access the server via SSH.
How do I connect to vsftpd?
As the firewall does not expose vsftpd out of the box, you will need to open the following ports:
2140000-50000
Only one user is authorised to access the FTP server out of the box (aptly named ftp). Before this user can authenticate, a password must be created for the account by running passwd ftp as root.
Note: the ftp user account is explicitly prohibited from logging into the server via SSH
If you want to allow other local user accounts to authenticate, you must:
- Create a directory owned by root at:
/srv/ftp/users/$USER - Create a directory owned by the user at
/srv/ftp/users/$USER/files - Add the user's name to
/etc/vsftpd.userlist
What aliases are available?
serve-this
An alias that will serve the current working directory using the Python SimpleHTTPServer module
Example:
# Serve /tmp/shiva on port 9090
cd /tmp/shiva
serve-this 9090
msfconsole
An alias which will first start the postgresql service prior to launching the standard msfconsole binary; allowing for Metasploit to have access to the database.
Note: the postgresql service is not automatically stopped after msfconsole is stopped
masscan_port_list
Parse the output of masscan into a CSV of unique port numbers.
masscan_ip_list
Parse the output of masscan to generate a list of unique IP addresses.
extract_unique_domains_from_dnsrecon_json
Parse a JSON file created by dnsrecon to extract the unique domain names found.
Example to extract all subdomains found that belong to google.com: extract_unique_domains_from_dnsrecon_json /path/to/dnsrecon.json google.com
Roadmap
There are three things I'd like to push with this going forward:
- Increase the tool set (with useful tools, not just pushing up the count with useless stuff)
- Setup Travis to add testing against the GitHub repository
- Test against systems other than Ubuntu 18.04 and make adjustments to allow for a more robust list of base systems
If you can help with any of these and [more importantly] would like to - please feel free to submit pull requests or open issues with information!