Offensive security home lab

An authorized home lab for offensive-security practice: penetration testing against targets I own or have explicit permission to test, Capture the Flag challenges, and GPU-assisted password cracking. The workstation exists and is in use; the surrounding lab is still being built out.

The full environment, including the travel network and remote-access tooling, is documented on the lab page. This entry is the project view of it.

What runs today

• A Windows 11 virtualization workstation (Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 32 GB RAM, RTX 5070) hosting disposable VMs for CTF and penetration testing practice.
• Hashcat password-cracking exercises against hashes generated inside the lab, using the GPU rather than any external service.
• An Obsidian vault capturing methodology, so solves become repeatable rather than one-off.

Planned build-out

This is the roadmap, not a list of things that exist yet:

1. Segmented lab network so practice targets stay isolated from anything I depend on day to day.
2. A rotating set of intentionally vulnerable targets (self-hosted practice VMs) to exercise enumeration, exploitation, and post-exploitation.
3. Defensive visibility on the same lab, so offensive activity can be matched against what a defender would actually see. This is where the CySA+ background is useful.

Ground rules

Everything stays inside VMs and authorized targets. No credentials, keys, private addresses, or exact topology appear here or anywhere in the repository.