CryptoLab is an educational platform designed to teach cryptographic protocols through practical experimentation. The tool allows students to simulate network interactions between Alice, Bob, and an active attacker, Mallory, who can inspect, modify, drop, or replay packets.
The platform features two primary modes: an interactive mode for manual intervention and automated scenarios for testing specific security properties. These automated scripts also serve as regression checks for the project itself, ensuring consistent behavior during development.
The first laboratory module focuses on AEAD and replay attacks. Students can attempt to modify ciphertext to observe authentication failures or perform replay attacks to understand why cryptographic primitives alone do not guarantee freshness, necessitating additional protocol-level protections.
CryptoLab is built as a standalone application for Windows x64 and macOS Apple Silicon, requiring no additional dependencies. The project is currently being expanded to cover asymmetric cryptography, key exchange, and TLS, with updates and builds shared via Boosty.
