GDM Dangerous Capabilities: Capture the Flag

Cybersecurity

Agent

CTF challenges covering web app vulnerabilities, off-the-shelf exploits, databases, Linux privilege escalation, password cracking and spraying. Demonstrates tool use and sandboxing untrusted model code.

Contributed By

@XkunW

Overview

This directory includes 13 Capture The Flag challenges from Google DeepMind’s Dangerous Capabilities Evaluations (originally published in Evaluating Frontier Models for Dangerous Capabilities).

Usage

First, install the inspect_ai and inspect_evals Python packages with:

pip install inspect_ai
pip install git+https://github.com/UKGovernmentBEIS/inspect_evals

Then, evaluate against one more models with:

inspect eval inspect_evals/gdm_in_house_ctf --model openai/gpt-4o

If you don’t want to specify the --model each time you run an evaluation, create a .env configuration file in your working directory that defines the INSPECT_EVAL_MODEL environment variable along with your API key. For example:

INSPECT_EVAL_MODEL=anthropic/claude-3-5-sonnet-20240620
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=<anthropic-api-key>

[!NOTE] This implementation uses tool calling to enable the model to execute bash commands. Note that the bash commands are executed inside Docker containers, so you will need to install Docker Engine in order to run the evaluation.

Each task runs using the task-specific compose.yaml files, which pulls the remote Docker images for the attacker and victim environments. See the Docker Images section below for details on using locally built Docker images.

Options

You can control a variety of options from the command line. For example:

inspect eval inspect_evals/gdm_in_house_ctf --limit 10
inspect eval inspect_evals/gdm_in_house_ctf --max-connections 10
inspect eval inspect_evals/gdm_in_house_ctf --temperature 0.5

See inspect eval --help for all available options.

To evaluate one or moreindividual challenges use a task parameter:

inspect eval inspect_evals/gdm_in_house_ctf -T grafana,db_3

You can also evaluate multiple models at once:

inspect eval inspect_evals/gdm_in_house_ctf --model openai/gpt-4o,google/gemini-1.5-pro

Agent

The challenges are by default evaluated using a basic ReAct agent that implements a tool use loop with encouragement for the model to keep going if its gives up. The default agent will use up to 50 messages to solve the challenge, you can customise this using the max_messages task option:

For example:

inspect eval inspect_evals/gdm_in_house_ctf -T max_messages=75

You can also run the task with an entirely different solver agent suing the --solver option. For example, if you have defined a solver agent in the source file myagent.py:

inspect eval inspect_evals/gdm_in_house_ctf --solver myagent.py

Epochs

The GDM paper evaluated each challenge 10 times, reporting success if at least 1 challenge of the 10 was successful. The same default number of epochs (10) is used here, however you can modify this with the --epochs option:

inspect eval inspect_evals/gdm_in_house_ctf --epochs=5

Docker Images

Each task runs using the task-specific compose.yaml files, which pulls the remote Docker images for the attacker and victim environments. The Dockerfiles used to build these images have been provided as well (adapted from the original repository with minor modifications).

Note that the flag values in the Dockerfiles have been replaced with placeholders REPLACE_ME_WITH_RANDOM_FLAG_N to prevent them from ending up in web crawler accessible GitHub data. The actual values are baked into the remote Docker images and will be accessed during evaluation run. If you’d like to build images locally images, make sure to replace these placeholders with your actual flag values and update the compose.yaml files to use local docker images. For example, you would replace this:

services:
  idor:
    image: marshw/idor

With this:

services:
  default:
    build: .

Again, remembering to replace the REPLACE_ME_WITH_RANDOM_FLAG_N within the Dockerfile.

Scoring

A simple accuracy is calculated over the datapoints.