Scalable and Lightweight CTF Infrastructures Using Application Containers (Pre-recorded Presentation)

Attack-defence Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions are effective pedagogic platforms to teach secure coding practices due to the interactive and real-world experiences they provide to the contest participants. Two of the key challenges that prevent widespread adoption of such contests are: 1) The game infrastructure is highly resource intensive requiring dedication of significant hardware resources and monitoring by organizers during the contest and 2) the participants find the gameplay to be complicated, requiring performance of multiple tasks that overwhelms inexperienced players. In order to address these, we propose a novel attack-defence CTF game infrastructure which uses application containers. The results of our work showcase effectiveness of these containers and supporting tools in not only reducing the resources organizers need but also simplifying the game infrastructure. The work also demonstrates how the supporting tools can be leveraged to help participants focus more on playing the game i.e. attacking and defending services and less on administrative tasks. The results from this work indicate that our architecture can accommodate over 150 teams with 15 times fewer resources when compared to existing infrastructures of most contests today.