PG Play and Practice rules can also be found by clicking on this icon in the upper right area of the control panel.

PLAY NICE

Our mission at Offensive Security is to empower the world to fight cyber threats by inspiring the Try Harder mindset. To get there, we aim to build a global community of like minded, passionate people who can treat other members as a family, act with integrity, and that constantly challenge themselves to create new ideas and adapt. As a new community member we expect you to live up to Our Values and respect our Academic Policy.

While we recognize there are multiple ways to do things dishonestly, there’s only one way to do it right. Aim for that!

BEFORE YOU START

To connect to our labs you will need a VPN connection. Start by downloading the VPN pack, get your username and password and connect to VPN. Once you have an active VPN connection, you will be able to start a machine in any of the Proving Grounds labs.

We don’t store your VPN password once generated. In case you lose it you will have to generate a new one to reconnect to the VPN.

IN THE LAB

Every student has access to private machines, that allows them to start one machine at a time without having to worry that other users will access it during your interaction.

The flag values are dynamically generated when you start a machine and they are destroyed when the machine is stopped. That means that you should submit their values while the machine is still running. While we recognize that students come with different experiences and this affects the time to exploit a machine, we also expect that to get the flag values any student will need a minimum of 15 minutes working on a machine.

Some of the machines come with walkthroughs and hints to unblock aspiring students, but our expectation is for you to try harder and figure it out with as little help as possible. As such, we ask you to work on a machine for at least 1.5 hours before being able to view hints and walkthroughs.

We would love to hear your feedback on machines that you have successfully exploited or have worked on for at least 3 hours.

SUBSCRIPTION LIMITATIONS

Proving Grounds Play is FREE to all registered users. It provides access to our growing pool of free, community submitted machines for 3 hours over a 24 hour window. You can access these machines under the Play tab. Any machine that has been started will be closed once you reach this limit and your access to the lab will be closed.

Proving Grounds Practice subscription provides you with unlimited access* to Practice lab, one machine at a time, that contains Windows and Linux based machines developed by the OffSec team and includes unrestricted access* to Proving Grounds Play community machines.

MACHINES ROTATION

New machines are added to Proving Grounds Play and Proving Grounds Practice on a regular basis. Retired Play machines will be moved under the Practice tab and will continue to be available for PG Practice subscribers. Please note you can still download the retired Play machines on the Vulnhub website.

*While we do not intend to restrict your access to machines, we would also like to ensure that resources are used in an efficient way. In case your VPN connection is closed, the system will also close the running machine. The machine will also close automatically after 12 hours.

Note:  To return to the list of machines, click the Machines list icon.