Cyber Security Base 2024
MOOC.fi

Installation guide

The programming exercises in Securing Software and Advanced Topics are based on python, save for few exceptions where javascript is used.

In order to do programming exercises, you need to install several software packages:

  • TestMyCode (TMC) client in order to download the exercises and upload your solutions
  • Python 3

In addition, Securing Software requires

  • several additional packages to test python exercises
  • ChromeDriver + Chrome to test javascript exercises

Installing TMC

TMC requires a fairly modern Java 8 or later to work properly. Open jdk 1.8.0_212 for example works as should all 11.x and 12.x versions. You can try to install and run tmc and update your java install if logging in with the cli fails.

Follow the instructions on the following page to install TMC client.

Note that on this course we use the command line version of TMC, not netbeans or any other IDE. So, you need to know the basics of command line use in the terminal/command prompt.

If you detest command line usage, it is possible to use Visual Studio IDE (with python) as there is also a Visual Studio plugin for TMC client.

Installing Python 3

The exercises requires Python 3 (3.5 or higher). This may be confusing as for example Macs come with preinstalled Python 2. There are many many ways to install Python 3

  • Download it from the official website.
  • Ubuntu/debian users can use apt-get.
  • Mac users can use MacPorts if it is installed.
  • Popular distribution of python, anaconda or miniconda, has its own package installation system. This distribution should work but it has not been tested. If you already have anaconda installed, we suggest that you try to install the needed packages with anaconda.

We assume from now on that the command for Python 3 is python3 which should be the case for mac / linux. It may be also just python, in which case, whenever we ask you to type python3, just type python. This is especially true if you are using windows. You can see the version of your python with

python3 --version

It is not a bad idea to have python reachable via PATH environment variable. This should be more-or-less automatic for mac and linux. Official Windows installer asks whether you want to have yout python in PATH (say yes).

Installing additional packages

This step is only required for Securing Software.

Package installer for Python (pip) should be already installed with modern python if you installed python from python.org or using conda distribution. If you you installed it using apt-get or port, then most likely you will need to install pip. The package name is probably python3-pip, alternatively follow these instructions to install pip.

Install the following packages using pip

python3 -m pip install django "selenium<4" "urllib3<2" beautifulsoup4 requests

The latest selenium (major version 4) and the latest urllib3 (major version 2) have some incompability issues, so we are installing older versions.

You need to allow your firewall software to allow python to listen and to connect to the internet.

Installing ChromeDriver and Chrome

This step is only required for Securing Software.

There are few programming exercises that require writing javascript. In order to test these exercises locally, the tests rely on a chrome browser.

Two pieces of software are required

When installing ChromeDriver you need to make sure that the driver version matches the browser version, otherwise the driver refuses to work. The browser version can be seen by going to chrome://version .

You also need to make sure that both chrome and the chromedriver can be reached via PATH environment variable, that is, you should be able to open the chromedriver and the browser via command line without specifying the exact location of the executable.

Chromedriver doesn't come with an installer. Instead it's a zipped executable. You need to unzip the package, and place the executable somewhere where the PATH can reach it.

Google Chrome has a tendency to update itself. When this happens you will need to update your chrome driver manually.

Sanity check

To test the installed packages download the script and test it with python

python3 sanity.py

The script will test if the python packages are installed and uses selenium to access google.com. Note that this script tests the installations required for the Securing Software course. These packages are not needed for Advanced topics.

Downloading the exercises

Go to a folder where you want to download the exercises, and issue command tmc login.

If it asks for a server address, then your TMC client is outdated. Re-install the client.

Provide login details, and use organization slug mooc.

Download the exercises for securing software with the command

tmc download mooc-securing-software-24

Download the exercises for the advanced topics with the command

tmc download mooc-cyber-advanced-topics-2024

NB! Do not change the name of the root directory, for example it should stay as mooc-securing-software-23.

You can test the exercises locally with tmc test and submit your solutions with tmc submit. See tmc help for additional commands.

You can test individual exercise by going to an exercise-specific folder, or you can test all of them at once by issuing testing commands at root.

Every exercise has automated tests. If you end up in situation where tmc test cannot find any test, you can locate the bug by either starting the application yourself (if the programming exercise is django, then start the server with manage.py) or submit the exercise and see the logs on TMC website.

NB! The TMC server tests the exercises with Python 3.7. Most likely, your Python installation will be a newer version. Make sure that you do not use any features that were introduced after Python 3.7 such as := syntax. Otherwise, this may lead to a situation where the tests are passed locally but not remotely. You can see the error and the stacktrace by going to the TMC website.

There are no limitations for resubmissions.