Welcome to pwn.college!

pwn.college is a first-stage education platform for students (and other interested parties) to learn about, and practice, core cybersecurity concepts in a hands-on fashion. It is designed to take a “white belt” in cybersecurity to becoming a “yellow belt”, able to approach (simple) CTFs and wargames. The philosophy of pwn.college is “practice makes perfect”.

pwn.college was created by Zardus (Yan Shoshitaishvili) and kanak (Connor Nelson) at Arizona State University. It powers ASU’s Computer Systems Security course, CSE466, and is now open, for free, to participation for interested people around the world!

pwn.college is hosted across a number of internet services:

Stream Schedule (NOTE: PLEASE make sure to watch all the module videos before the Wednesday stream!):

Extended module Q&A, auxiliary lecturing, and collaborative problem solving: Wednesdays at 4:30pm on Twitch. NEXT MODULE: sandboxing

Yan’s office hours: Mondays at 3:00pm on Twitch.

Connor’s office hours: Tuesdays at 2:00pm on Twitch.

All streams are open to THE WORLD! ASU students will get a private voice channel, but everyone can ask questions on twitch.

If you have other comments, suggestions, and feedback, please email us at pwn-college@asu.edu!

Who is this for? (prerequisites)

Consider hacking as a martial art. Newcomers begin as white belts, with zero security knowledge. Slowly and painfully, they become yellow belts, able to reason about simple security challenges and start down the road of, for example, CTF competitions. Over time, they become more sure in their skills, achieving brown belt status (and able to, for example, contribute to the cybersecurity industry), before finally graduating to hacking masters: black belts.

pwn.college is meant for white belts. If you already know the basics of hacking (and, thus, are a yellow belt), you will find this resource very easy. If you are a brown belt, you will find it quite boring. If you are a black belt, it will put you to sleep.

That being said, just because the material is for beginners does not mean that the concepts are basic. The course tackles complex concepts, up to and including the inner working of OS kernels. Good Computer Organization and OS courses covering the following are recommended.

C programming.

C compilation.

x86_64 assembly.

OS internals (system calls, etc).

Linux operations (FS layout, permissions, shell scripting, etc).

Though pwn.college has an introduction module that covers some fundamentals, a lack of knowledge in these areas will lead to heavy difficulties in the course.

How do I jump in?

pwn.college is organized as a set of modules covering different topics. Each module has a set of lecture slides and videos and practice problems auto-generated for each aspiring hacker to practice on. Challenges come in a teaching variety, which will walk you through their own solutions, and a testing variety, which will challenge you with less guidance. Challenges are run directly on pwn.college, and can be launched in practice mode, where you have root access but there is a fake flag, and real mode, where you cannot read the flag without exploiting the challenge.

pwn.college has come out of beta, and modules are being launched alongside the progress of ASU’s Fall 2020 CSE466 class. So far, the following modules are live:

Module 0: Introduction

Module 1: Privilege Escalation

Module 2: Shellcode

Module 3: Sandboxing

Module 4: Binary Reverse Engineering

Module 5: Introduction to Memory Corruption: videos launch weekend of 09/19, challenges launch 09/23

Module 6: Return Oriented Programming: videos launch weekend of 09/26, challenges launch 09/30

Module 7: Dynamic Allocator Misuse: videos launch weekend of 10/03, challenges launch 10/07

Module 8: Format String Abuse: videos launch weekend of 10/10, challenges launch 10/14

Module 9: Race Conditions: videos launch weekend of 10/17, challenges launch 10/21

Module 10: Kernel Exploitation: videos launch weekend of 10/31, challenges launch 11/04

Module 11: Automatic Vulnerability Discovery: videos launch weekend of 11/07, challenges launch 11/11

Additional modules will be launched on a weekly basis! If you are impatient, you can check out archived modules from the pwn.college beta at the bottom of the page.

Further Practice

After you learn the basics of cybersecurity and achieve yellow belt status, you should move on to harder challenges.

Capture The Flags (CTFs) are a great way to practice your hacking skills in a fun and ethical way. The most popular way to find upcoming events is at https://ctftime.org. If you are at ASU, feel free to check out and join ASU’s CTF club pwndevils at https://pwndevils.com.

Wargames are another great way to practice your hacking skills. Whereas CTFs are short (normally 48 hour) events, wargames are not time-based. You can find a list of wargames at https://github.com/zardus/wargame-nexus.

If you want to get involved with cybersecurity research, but don’t know how, consider joining us for an internship at ASU.

Contributing

The infrastructure powering pwn.college and the web-facing content are open source, and we welcome pull requests and issues. The modules are closed-source, because they include source code and solution scripts. If you are an educator, or otherwise someone we trust, and are interested in collaborating on the modules themselves, please email us at pwn-college@asu.edu. Likewise, drop us a line if you are interested in collaborating on the slides!

ARCHIVED MODULES FROM THE PWN-COLLEGE BETA

The pwn-college beta was announced at HITCON 2019 and ran until August 2020. All of the old material is still available below: