e Capture-The-Flag (eCTF)
Hacking competitions such as Capture the Flag used to be few and far between. Capture the Flag (CTF) is a series of security challenges, from Cryptography to Web Exploits, Reverse-engineering and more. Participants submit a flag (a answer they found) to solve the challenge. eCTF aims to improve the competitor's experience where as well as simplfy the creation and management of the competition enviroment to allow organisers to focus more creating challenges.
Pain Points
Usually during a CTF competition, competitors are provided access to a website where they can view their challenges and submit their flag to earn points.
However, that website does not have addtional features such as chatting with their teammates or other teams, leaving competitors to use other services such as WhatsApp to communicate with each other.
This results in the organisers facing a problem in montioring on what the competitors are discussing as they may be cheating, leaving the competition to be an unfair one
Also, the organisers will have to do reserach and set up the challenges on their own before publishing it to the website.
Features
Competition and Team Administration: Allow the organisers to manage competitions and teams particpating in those competitions
Forum: Participants can communicate with other teams as well as allowing organisers to post competition-wide annoucements
Live Chat: Participants can chat with each other in their own team
NewsFeed: Allow organisers to keep up-to-date with the lastest in CyberSecurity news
Platform Management: Organisers can see how the platform is running and if any problems with AWS affect the platform
Challenge Management: Organisers can easily post challenges as well as set up the challenge enviroments within the platform
Project Specfics
Coded on ASP.NET Core
Platform Website based on Boostrap 4 Template
Hosted on Amazon Web Services
Application Data stored using Amazon Relational Database Service
Platform/Challenge Networking and Servers using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud and Elastic Compute Cloud 2
Logical seperation between Platform and Challenge Networks
Platform Alerts and Emails sent by Amazon Simple Notification Service and Simple Email Service respectively