MITRE Caldera™

MITRE Caldera™ is a cyber security platform designed to easily automate adversary emulation, assist manual red-teams, and automate incident response.

It is built on the MITRE ATT&CK™ framework and is an active research project at MITRE.

The framework consists of two components:

1. The core system. This is the framework code, consisting of what is available in this repository. Included is an asynchronous command-and-control (C2) server with a REST API and a web interface.
2. Plugins. These repositories expand the core framework capabilities and providing additional functionality. Examples include agents, reporting, collections of TTPs and more.

Resources & Socials

• 📜 Documentation, training, and use-cases
• ✍️ Caldera's blog
• 🌐 Homepage

Plugins

⭐ Create your own plugin! Plugin generator: Skeleton ⭐

Default

These plugins are supported and maintained by the Caldera team.

• Access (red team initial access tools and techniques)
• Atomic (Atomic Red Team project TTPs)
• Builder (dynamically compile payloads)
• Caldera for OT (ICS/OT capabilities for Caldera)
• Compass (ATT&CK visualizations)
• Debrief (operations insights)
• Emu (CTID emulation plans)
• Fieldmanual (documentation)
• GameBoard (visualize joint red and blue operations)
• Human (create simulated noise on an endpoint)
• Magma (VueJS UI for Caldera v5)
• Manx (shell functionality and reverse shell payloads)
• Response (incident response)
• Sandcat (default agent)
• SSL (enable https for caldera)
• Stockpile (technique and profile storehouse)
• Training (certification and training course)

More

These plugins are ready to use but are not included by default and are not maintained by the Caldera team.

• Arsenal (MITRE ATLAS techniques and profiles)
• CalTack (embedded ATT&CK website)
• Pathfinder (vulnerability scanning)
• SAML (SAML authentication)

Requirements

These requirements are for the computer running the core framework:

• Any Linux or MacOS
• Python 3.8+ (with Pip3)
• Recommended hardware to run on is 8GB+ RAM and 2+ CPUs
• Recommended: GoLang 1.17+ to dynamically compile GoLang-based agents.
• NodeJS (v16+ recommended for v5 VueJS UI)

Installation

Concise installation steps:

git clone https://github.com/mitre/caldera.git --recursive
cd caldera
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
python3 server.py --insecure --build

Full steps: Start by cloning this repository recursively, passing the desired version/release in x.x.x format. This will pull in all available plugins.

git clone https://github.com/mitre/caldera.git --recursive --tag x.x.x

Next, install the PIP requirements:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Super-power your Caldera server installation! Install GoLang (1.19+)

Finally, start the server.

python3 server.py --insecure --build

The --build flag automatically installs any VueJS UI dependencies, bundles the UI into a dist directory, and is served by the Caldera server. You will only have to use the --build flag again if you add any plugins or make any changes to the UI. Once started, log into http://localhost:8888 using the default credentials red/admin. Then go into Plugins -> Training and complete the capture-the-flag style training course to learn how to use Caldera.

If you prefer to not use the new VueJS UI, revert to Caldera v4.2.0. Correspondingly, do not use the --build flag for earlier versions as not required.

User Interface Development

If you'll be developing the UI, there are a few more additional installation steps.

Requirements

• NodeJS (v16+ recommended)

Setup

1. Add the Magma submodule if you haven't already: git submodule add https://github.com/mitre/magma
2. Install NodeJS dependencies: cd plugins/magma && npm install && cd ..
3. Start the Caldera server with an additional flag: python3 server.py --uidev localhost

Your Caldera server is available at http://localhost:8888 as usual, but there will now be a hot-reloading development server for the VueJS front-end available at http://localhost:3000. Both logs from the server and the front-end will display in the terminal you launched the server from.

Docker Deployment

To build a Caldera docker image, ensure you have docker installed and perform the following actions:

# Recursively clone the Caldera repository if you have not done so
git clone https://github.com/mitre/caldera.git --recursive

# Build the docker image. Change image tagging as desired.
# WIN_BUILD is set to true to allow Caldera installation to compile windows-based agents.
# Alternatively, you can use the docker compose YML file via "docker-compose build"
cd caldera
docker build . --build-arg WIN_BUILD=true -t caldera:latest

# Run the image. Change port forwarding configuration as desired.
docker run -p 8888:8888 caldera:latest

To gracefully terminate your docker container, do the following:

# Find the container ID for your docker container running Caldera
docker ps

# Stop the container
docker stop [container ID]

Contributing

Refer to our contributor documentation.

Vulnerability Disclosures

Refer to our vulnerability discolosure documentation for submitting bugs.

Licensing

To discuss licensing opportunities, please reach out to caldera@mitre.org or directly to MITRE's Technology Transfer Office.

Caldera Benefactor Program

If you are interested in partnering to support, sustain, and evolve MITRE Caldera™'s open source capabilities, please contact us at caldera@mitre.org.