InetSec 2 - Capture The Flag/07| Homepage | People | Research | Teaching |
| InetSec 2 - Capture The Flag/07 |
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Some FunIntroduction The UCSB Capture The
Flag is a distributed, wide-area security exercise organized
by our sister lab in Santa Barbara, whose goal is to test the
security skills of students from both the attack and defense
viewpoints.
Most of the TU team was in the "CTF" lab from about 16:00 in the afternoon, until 03:30(!) in the morning. This time, we managed to consume many liters of soft drinks, mineral water and about 250 Euros worth of pizzas ;-) In short, the whole event was fun for us (i.e., Engin and Chris) and hope that everyone else in the team "had a blast" too (remember the "who's this guy?" trivia challenge ;-)) This year, the pressure on us was actually quite high. After all, we were the title defenders. So, everyone was expecting a decent performance from us. Our hope was to be able to perform at least as well as in the other CTFs. We thought it would be great if we could be among the top 5 teams... Considering that there were about 36 university teams taking part, that would mean that we would be in the top 15 percent. At the end of the contest, when we found out that we had "captured" the 4th place, we were delighted. The last part of the CTF did not run too smoothly for us and we actually thought that we were going to be 6th. We started setting up our infrastructure at around 14.00. It turned out that many things were missing (e.g., ethernet cables) so we had to go and buy the stuff. Furthermore, we had to organize switches and make sure that our servers were running. Although the connectivity was fine, at 16.00, we had problems with the iptables rules and had stress for about 20 minutes until we found out what was happening. There were quite a number of problems that we came across during the contest. First, unfortunately, there was a problem with the UCSB scoring bot so the flags that we were submitting were returning error messages. The UCSB folks (who are actually not only our colleagues, but also our friends ;-)) were very responsive and did their best to fix the issues. After a couple of hours, our flag submissions started working fine and the UCSB folks were nice enough to inform us that they were going to calculate our points also based on the flags that we had submitted before using their logs. That made us feel better. However, we had no way of guessing how we were performing. This year, one new thing in the CTF was that there were challenges that we were required to solve before we could start getting offense and defense points. Actually, we were pretty good in solving the challenges, but unfortunately, failed to solve some trivia questions such as identifying the picture of the guy who wrote the Blaster worm ;-) There were a wide range of guesses ranging from "Giovanni Vigna" (*grin*) to "Michael Moore". Oh well... ;-) We are actually pretty happy with our performance as we managed to be in the top 4 teams in all 4 CTFs that we took part in so far. We think it is a pretty good performance. We hope it is not too arrogant when we say that we were probably the only team that always managed to be in the top 4 until now ;-) Well, let's hope that it stays this way. In any case, we'd like to thank Heinz Deinhart for helping us out with the infrastructure and Thomas Toth for his support. Congratulations to Mattia's team (Chocolate Makers), to Thorsten (squareroots), and to the folks from Russia (Hackerdom). Nice game guys. Here are the final scores. Check out these pictures of the event and the party afterwards ;-). Here is a press report: Last Modified: Tue Mar 2 15:50:43 CET 2010 |
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