Katana

John Hammond | Caleb Stewart | February 18th, 2019

Documentation: https://ctf-katana.readthedocs.io

This repository attempts to offer code and material to automate "running through the check-list" or hitting the "low-hanging fruit" in a Capture the Flag challenge. It is meant to act as a utility to help an individual do things they might otherwise forget to do.

A lot of the context and ideas from this stem from the living document at https://github.com/JohnHammond/ctf-katana

Katana is written in Python 3.

Please note that this project is not heavily maintained.

DISCLAIMER

Katana will automatically run code and do potentially "malicious" things to its target. It may throw SQL injection, it may try test for local file inclusion, uploading web shells or finding a means of remote code execution. DO NOT, by any means, run this utility against ANYTHING that you do not have explicit permission and authorization to test.

We do not claim responsibility or involvement for anything you break or any trouble you may get into by using this tool.

Getting Started

We recommend running this with the latest version of Python and inside of a virtual environment.

On Ubuntu

sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install -y python-tk tk-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev pandoc \
	libgmp3-dev libzbar-dev tesseract-ocr xsel libpoppler-cpp-dev libmpc-dev \
	libdbus-glib-1-dev ruby libenchant-dev apktool nodejs groff binwalk \
	foremost tcpflow poppler-utils exiftool steghide stegsnow bison ffmpeg \
	libgd-dev less

Setup

python3.7 -m venv env
source env/bin/activate
python setup.py install

If things seemed to go wrong during your installation, and you just want a clean slate, you can tear down your virtual environment and start again. Note that you will need to run python setup.py install one more time.

If you're on a very old Ubuntu distribution and had to install Python 3.7 manually, you may need to install virtualenv manually, and use virtualenv vice python3.7 -m venv like so:

pip3.7 install virtualenv
virtualenv env
source env/bin/activate

After installation, Katana will still require multiple external dependencies. The installation of each of these depends on your distribution and package manager, so an easier solution is to run Katana through Docker. You can read more about this in the docker/ directory.

Usage

Whenever Katana runs, it creates a results directory where it stores its findings and artifacts (files et. al.) that may be generated from units.

Katana will not run if the results directory already exists. You can have Katana automatically remove the results directory before it runs with the --force command-line argument.

katana --force -f "FLAG{.*?}" "RkxBR3t0aGlzX2lzX2FfYmFzZTY0X2ZsYWd9"

Framework Methodology

Katana works with a "boss -> worker" topology. One thread (the boss) spins off other threads (the workers) and returns the results once they have all completed. Each worker is called a "unit". The unit is what actually goes about and accomplishes the task.

To add functionality to Katana, you simply need to create units. The boss will then handle them appropriately.

You can read more about it in the docs directory.

Contributing

If you would like to contribute to Katana, please see CONTRIBUTING.md

Thank You and Credits

As we got further along in development, we asked members of my Discord server if they would like to assist in creating units. The following is a list of units that were contributions from these members and their names, to offer our kudos and thank you. This project would not be what it is without your help!

crypto.dna - voidUpdate, Zwedgy
crypto.t9 - Zwedgy, r4j
esoteric.ook - Liikt
esoteric.cow - Drnkn
stego.audio_spectrogram - Zwedgy
stego.dtmf_decoder - Zwedgy
stego.whitespace - l14ck3r0x01
hash.md5 - John Kazantzis
esoteric.jsfuck - Zwedgy
crypto.playfair - voidUpdate
crypto.nato_phonetic - voidUpdate