Some Fun

The UCSB Capture The Flag is a distributed, wide-area security exercise, whose goal is to test the security skills of students from both the attack and defense viewpoints.

This year, the UCSB CTF took place on Friday the 3rd of December, 2004. Because of the time difference, most of the TU team was in the "CTF" lab from about 16:00 in the afternoon, until 02:00(!) in the morning. During this time, we managed to consume about 10 liters of Coke, 6-8 liters of mineral water and about 14 pizzas ;-)

The TU Vienna participated in the contest with the following great team and managed to take the "unofficial" third place (explanation follows):

Team Name: We_0wn_Y0u

Team Members:

• Bernhard "The Voracious" Erb
• Wolfgang "The Perfectionist" Granzer
• Fritz "The Diver" Praus
• David "The Furious" Schmidt
• Karl "The Determined" Gmeiner
• Manuel "The Pizzaman" Egele
• Florian "The Killer" Pötscher
• Andreas "The Magnificent" Moser
• Dietmar "The Destroyer" Ebner
• Christian "The Dude" Schanes
• Martin "The Postman" Szydlowski
• Florian "The Braveheart" Nentwich
• Christian "The Reflective" Steiner

Unfortunately, most teams experienced serious connectivity problems during the first 4 hours. This was the first time such a large-scale CTF contest was being organized and therefore, there were unexpected problems with NAT and VPN. Some teams (us being one of them :-() were unfortunately only able to defend their services, but did not really get a chance to attack for a long time. Finally, after many hours of waiting and many pizzas, the problem was identified as being NAT on the site boxes.

At about 00:30 in the morning, we deactivated NAT and got connectivity to the other teams. The "fun" was short-lived (about an hour for us), but still intensive ;-) We managed to score at a very fast rate and went up from about 7th/8th place to the 3rd place by the end of the contest. The scoring, was quite skewed by then so the results are "unofficial", but from a relative point of view and based on our short offensive performance, we are confident that we could have "destroyed" many teams *grin*. Our defense was strong and we proved that we had a good offensive potential as well. Anyway, next year, we'll win *grin*.

An interesting note: Our U.S. opponents surprised us. Although it was only something like 5:00pm in the afternoon for them, many of them got "tired", gave up and went home :-). Most Europeans stayed until way past midnight and put up a good fight. This is what we call motivation folks :-)

Here is a copy of the final scores. To be fair, this is not really representative because more than half of the teams either did not have connectivity or left the contest. However, this scoreboard is pretty representative of the folks who remained until the end.

We would like to thank our team for the fun and the great performance ;-).