pentest_lab

pentest_lab

198 Stars

Local penetration testing lab using docker-compose.

oliverwiegers
May 27, 2025
198 stars
Category
Vulnerable-labs
GitHub Stars
198
Project Added On
May 27, 2025
Contributors
1

Pentest Lab

I’m not actively developing on this anymore, but will fix bugs and look at
issues and pull requests.
Help is appreciated :)

This local pentest lab leverages docker compose to spin up multiple victim
services and an attacker service running Kali Linux. If you run this lab for
the first time it will take some time to download all the different docker
images.

Screencast


src="https://asciinema.org/a/VebTHWt6nZvTYJpvqWZja2kVb.svg"
align=right
width=400px/>

Executed commands:

  • ./lab.sh --help
  • ./lab.sh --check-dependencies
  • ./lab.sh --up --all-services
  • ./lab.sh --info
  • ./lab.sh --overview all
  • ssh root@kali -o "UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null"
  • ./lab.sh --down

Usage

The lab should work out of the box if all needed dependencies are installed.
At startup the lab will run a dependency check.

Start the lab

git clone https://github.com/oliverwiegers/pentest_lab
cd pentest_lab
./lab.sh -u

By default the lab will start all victim services and one red team service.
Other services can be started and added. More information on this down on this
below.

For further usage information consider reading the help message shown by
./lab.sh -h | --help.

Dependencies

  • bash
  • find
  • sed
  • yq (The Python version. Not yq-go.)
  • docker
  • docker-compose

The lab has a build in dependency check which runs at startup. This also can be
run manually ./lab.sh -C.

Heimdall

img

For ease of use a Heimdall interface
was added that is exposed to localhost:7000.
All services that are exposed to your local machine and can be accessed via
browser are listed there.
Changes that will be made to the interface are automatically saved in
./etc/heimheimdall. This directory is than turned into ./etc/heimdall.tar
while stopping the lab. This tar archive will be extracted on starup. Both
./etc/heimdall.tar and ./etc/heimdall are ignored by git by default.

Used wallpaper can be found here.

Services

This lab knows the following four types of services.

  • red_team
  • blue_team
  • victim
  • monitoring

The default red team service - the Kali service - is a pretty basic Kali
instance. Nonetheless kali-tools-web metapackage is installed. For a web
application testing lab the basic web testing tools seem to be useful.
This can be changed by editing the Dockerfile from which the image is
build. This is located at ./dockerfiles/kali.
The kali service installs these
dotfiles by default. This is also
changable by tweaking the Dockerfile.

Victim services

Monitoring services

img
img

Even though monitoring services are blue_team services as well these are split
up in a different category.

This stack provides log and performance observation functionality.

For further information on single instances see below.

Currently the monitoring setup is made of the following services:

  • Grafana - Visualize logs and metrics.
  • Loki - Ship docker logs to grafana.
  • Prometheus - Ship metrics to grafana.
  • cAdvisor - Gather container ressource
    usage and metrics and ship to prometheus.

Grafana

The Grafana instance provides two dashboards one for logs and one for metrics.

These are pretty basic. One could add more by adding dashboards via the Grafana
interface. These dashboards will be lost when the grafana volume is deleted. To
permanently add dashboards consult the Provisioning
Docs
by
Grafana. Used directories for provisioning are located at ./etc/grafana/.

To change settings via Grafana interface one must login as admin. The
credentials are the default ones: admin:admin. #hacktheplanet

Loki

For Loki beeing able to gather docker logs this lab installs the Loki Docker
Driver
as Docker
plugin.

Prometheus / cAdvisor

For Prometheus beeing able to access performance metrics of the containers
running in the cluster cAdvisor is used.

Adding services

To add additional services a little knowledge of docker-compose.yml files is
needed. The docker-compose.yml in the root of this repository is auto
generated when the lab starts. This process uses the yaml files located unter
./etc/services.

➜  pentest_lab tree ./etc/services
./etc/services
├── blue_team
│   └── endlessh.yml
├── default.yml
├── monitoring
│   ├── cadvisor.yml
│   ├── grafana.yml
│   ├── loki.yml
│   └── prometheus.yml
├── red_team
└── victim
    ├── beginner
    │   ├── bwapp.yml
    │   ├── dvwa.yml
    │   ├── hackazon.yml
    │   ├── tiredful.yml
    │   ├── webgoat.yml
    │   └── xvwa.yml
    ├── expert
    │   └── juice-shop.yml
    └── intermediate
        └── ninjas.yml

Which services will be started is controlled by invoking ./lab.sh with the
corresponding options. To permanently disable a service remove the .yml file
extension.

An example of a victim service would be:

bwapp:
  labels:
    class: 'victim'
    cluster: 'pentest_lab'
    level: 'beginner'
  image: raesene/bwapp
  ports:
    - '8080:80'
  networks:
    pentest_lab:
      ipv4_address: 10.5.0.100
  hostname: bwapp
  volumes:
    - bwapp-data:/var/lib/mysql

Note: If a service requires some kind of installation at first usage use
docker inspect <image_name> to find out where the docker image stores the data
and add a volume pointing to this directory. In the example above this is:

  volumes:
    - bwapp-data:/var/lib/mysql

This ensures that you don’t have to setup the service again every time you
restart the lab. But if you want to reset the lab and completely start over
again you can use ./lab.sh -p | --prune. This will delete all resources owned by
the lab.

IP ranges

The reason we used static IP addresses is that the Kali box needs to have an IP
address that doesn’t change to simplify SSH login. More in information in the
Tips/Tricks section down below.

  • Red team services start at 10.5.0.5
    • The Kali service has 10.5.0.5.
  • Blue team services start at 10.5.0.50
  • Victim services start at 10.5.0.100
  • Monitoring services start at 10.5.0.200

Service Info

If you add services and there is additional information that is useful for
anyone running this lab you can add this information to ./etc/services_info.
Content of this file will be printed as is line by line by running
./lab.sh -i.

Tips/Tricks

SSH

For an easy connect to the Kali service one could add the following to
$HOME/.ssh/cofig:

Host kali
    User root
    Hostname 10.5.0.5
    UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
    StrictHostKeyChecking accept-new

So instead of ssh [email protected] -o "UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null" one could
run ssh kali.

For tmux users the following will attach to a tmux session automatically:

Host kali
    User root
    Hostname 10.5.0.5
    UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
    StrictHostKeyChecking accept-new
    RequestTTY yes
    RemoteCommand tmux -L tmux new-session -As hacktheplanet

Tool Information

Author

oliverwiegers

Project Added On

May 27, 2025

License

Open Source

Tags

bug-bounty bugbounty docker docker-compose penetration-testing pentest