CSSEF Server¶

Server Installation¶

The server requires systemd, python and pip.

Install the prerequisets

user@debian:~$ sudo apt-get install -y git python-pip python-dev systemd libsystemd-dev

Install the CSSEF server

user@debian:~$ git clone https://github.com/bplower/cssef.git
user@debian:~$ cd cssef/CssefServer
user@debian:~/cssef/CssefServer$ sudo make install

Verify the installation was successful

user@debian:~/cssef/CssefServer$ sudo systemctl is-enabled cssef-server.service
enabled
user@debian:~/cssef/CssefServer$ sudo systemctl start cssef-server.service
user@debian:~/cssef/CssefServer$ sudo systemctl status cssef-server.service | grep Active:
Active: active (running) since Thu 2016-09-01 22:00:49 AKDT; 6s ago

Server Configuration¶

Configurations can be loaded from several different sources, where values loaded later will overwrite previously set values. The order configuration values are loaded is as follows:

Default (hard coded)
Global config file
Command line configs

Please consider the following example:

The default client cache time for available endpoints is 24 hours, but is overwritten to a value of 12 hours in the global config file. However, you are troublshooting something related to plugins, so you’ve started the daemon with the cache time value set to 0 meaning the cache will be refreshed on each client request.

The value of the client cache time was overwritten twice in this example: once by the global configuration, and once by the value provided on the command line. Any configuration option may be set through any of the configuration sources (excluding the default configs for obvious reasons).

Available Options¶

admin-token

This should only be used for initial setup, but may be used in the event you are locked out of administrator accounts. The client may provide the token to authorize requests by completely bypassing username and password checks. If you are not actively using this, the value should be left blank, meaning admin-token auth is disabled.

Default:

Example config file

# Setting a weak admin token for initial setup
admin-token: abc123def456

Example command line

user@debian:~$ cssefd start --admin-token abc123def456

database-path

While using sqlite as the backend database, this option will be for the absolute path to store the database file at.

Default: /var/opt/cssef/db.sqlite3

Example config file

# Hold the database in memory for performance while testing
database-path: ''

Example command line

user@debian:~$ cssefd start --database-path ''

database-table-prefix

This value will be the prefix for every table in the database. Depending on your database backend, this may not be as important. The default will result in tables that look similar to “cssef_users”.

Attention

This feature is broken as of commit 993d87e. The prefix is hardcoded to “cssef” for the time being.

Default: cssef

Example config file

# Table prefix for production cssef installation
database-table-prefix: cssef-prod

Example command line

user@debian:~$ cssefd start --database-table-prefix cssef-prod

logging

I’ve completely skipped the logging values because they’re all basically useless right now…

installed-plugins

This is a list of plugins that conform to the CSSEF plugin model that should be imported. Those plugins must already be installed, and the entries in this list must be the names of the modules.

Default:

Example config file

# Include the default CCDC like competition and CTF competition
installed-plugins:
- cssef-cdc
- cssef-ctf

Example command line

user@debian:~$ cssefd start --installed-plugins cssef-ccdc,cssef-ctf