I am often asked the question by clients and students where people can go to learn hacking techniques for application security. For years, we have had many purposely vulnerable applications available to us. These applications provide a safe environment for us to learn more about hacking applications and the vulnerabilities that are exposed without the legal ramifications.
In this post I want to show you how simple it is to install the OWASP Juice Shop application using a Docker container. Juice Shop is a purposely vulnerable application written using NodeJS and Angular. It goes beyond just being an application with some vulnerabilities. It is set up to be a capture the flag (CTF) style application with its own scoreboard.
To learn more about the Juice Shop project, head over to https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Juice_Shop_Project. This is the main landing page and looks like the following:
On the right hadn’t side there are links to Installation instructions. Clicking on the Docker Link takes us to the following page (https://hub.docker.com/r/bkimminich/juice-shop/) (Scroll down to the section on docker):
As you can see, there are only 4 steps to getting up and running with Docker. The first step is to install Docker. I won’t cover that here, but make sure you do have it installed before continuing on.
The next step is to pull the Juice-Shop docker container. This container is all set up and configured to run the Juice-Shop. No configurations necessary. To do this enter the command: docker pull bkimminich/juice-shop
The next step is to run the container. It is performed by simply running the following command: docker run –rm -p 3000:3000 bkimminich/juice-shop
As you can see, the juice shop is up and running, listening on port 3000. Port 3000 was specified when we called run passing in the -p option. ** If you get an error about the container not being able to start up, try restarting docker. I ran into this a few different times and a docker restart resolved the issue.
If everything is running as expected, we should be able to browse to http://localhost:3000 and access the Juice Shop as shown below:
The Juice Shop has a lot of vulnerabilities in it. It is a great way to learn more about how to exploit some of these vulnerabilities and test your skills. If you have little knowledge of application security vulnerabilities or the OWASP Top 10 check out our training courses we have available:
- Security Fundamentals for Application Teams (CBT) – Save $100 on registration with COUPON Code: spring2018
- Fundamentals of Application Security (Live-Remote) – New classes starting in August/September 2018.
Please remember that hacking is illegal. If you want to learn more about application security and test your skills, do it responsibly and use great applications like the Juice Shop as your targets.
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