Linux Security Challenge

[get_r00t]

Hi Everyone,
I'm starting a project that involves putting some Linux machines on the net, giving people an easy way to create user accounts, and letting them hack, crack and otherwise find their way to a root prompt. As this project will be fairly hardware intensive, I'd rather not waste resources on a distro that won't be used. So, my question is would anyone here be interested in trying their hand at getting root on a fairly standard Ubuntu server?
If you would rather try this on a different distro, please indicate that as well.

[WatchingThePain]

Lol then report them to the authorities!. I transferred some viruses from windows to Linux (7 Virii) as an experiment to aid humanity and they never did anything. Just sat there like lemons. So relaxxxx babies..it's all cool. Anyway it's a hackers job to get a root account so what does your experiment aim to achieve?.

[get_r00t]

The goal is to provide to the community a central location for people to do security research on a few different distros. Once someone gets root, they would close whatever hole they exploited or someone else might take it from them. I'm hoping they would also document their method of getting root and closing the hole, but I know that this won't happen in every case.
My personal goal in this is to gain a better understanding of the security threats against a Linux machine and how to handle them.

[koenn]

Hi Everyone,
I'm starting a project that involves putting some Linux machines on the net, giving people an easy way to create user accounts, and letting them hack, crack and otherwise find their way to a root prompt. As this project will be fairly hardware intensive, I'd rather not waste resources on a distro that won't be used. So, my question is would anyone here be interested in trying their hand at getting root on a fairly standard Ubuntu server?
If you would rather try this on a different distro, please indicate that as well.

sure, why not.
Not tht I think I'm any good at this, but it sounds like fun.
What type of server ?

[zany_001]

I could be wrong but are you trying something similiar to the Honeynet Project (http://www.honeynet.org/)?

[Dr Small]

This sounds like the old RootThisBox challenges (which obviously, no longer exist). Me, tronyx, Sega and others used to play the missions on one of the boxes trying to escalate privileges through exploitable programs that they had in each account.

Sounds like fun :)