Project Update

Two weeks after the release I want to inform you about my latest proceedings.

I have not received any feedback from users so far. I presume this is due to the fact that there is not really much to do with Hax in its current state, from a player's perspective. Despite of the silence, I am continuing development of Hax. Besides of some tweaks, minor enhancements and bugfixes, there are two major additions planned for the next release.

The first one is the implementation of a NAT (network address translation) network component. This will allow you to have an arbitrary address space in your internal network, with only a single global external address for connecting to remote networks. You will no longer need to worry about the uniqueness of addresses across all networks you are interconnected with, but rather only inside your own network. An additional feature of the NAT component is support for port forwarding, allowing you to publish selected services running on various machines and ports inside your network to be accessible from outside your network on a specific port and your external address. Thus, the device also takes on the role of a simple firewall by restricting traffic to your internal network except for explicitly configured services. Also, there will probably be another tutorial added, explaining the concept of NAT in more detail, although this might be postponed to a later release. The NAT itself is already implemented and functional.

The second major addition is a mission. Although I stated before that I would rather want to see missions published remotely than included locally in the distribution, I decided to go the latter way for now to create another proof of concept for the Hax framework, as well as to make Hax more attractive for the "gamers" out there. I decided to reimplement a mission from another hacking simulator which has been discontinued for many years now, but has nevertheless served me as great inspiration to create Hax. Some of you will certainly recognize it. About 20% of the mission is already implemented.

I am also playing with the idea of implementing a simplified version of domain names. Simplified means that name servers would not be simulated by the framework, but the functionality would rather be handled on the application level. This basically means implementing the concept of "host files" I wrote about earlier, but globally on the data center level rather than for each machine. The problem with this is that Hax is distributed, meaning the mapping of domain names to addresses would have to be somehow shared across multiple interconnected data centers. Another problem is local domain and subdomain names, which are rather difficult to support using this approach. I am still elaborating on this one.

Well, this is it for now. Stay tuned for further updates, and thank you for your interest in Hax.