CTFv

Link: https://ctfv.vercel.app/

Repo Link: https://github.com/IIT-BHU-CyberSec/CTFv

Why?

We identified a significant challenge: hosting a continuous CTF platform was prohibitively expensive using existing solutions like CTFd.

The “Daily Challenges” initiative was conceived as a way to keep cybersecurity enthusiasts engaged with fresh challenges every day, but traditional hosting solutions didn’t fit our budget constraints. Part of the challenge was to explore cost-effective solutions, which led us to serverless technologies, like Cloudflare Workers, which had pretty generous free tiers.

CTFv was developed as a COPS minor project with a team of 5 members. In just about 2 weeks of intensive development, we built a robust platform that went on to serve daily challenges for the following 2 months, which developed a strong interest in cybersecurity among the IIIT(BHU) community.

Project Overview

CTFv is a feature-rich, cost-free CTF platform built with ❤️ by COPS IIT(BHU). Designed using serverless technologies, CTFv is scalable, secure, and entirely free to run.

The platform hosted Daily Challenges as part of an initiative to engage users with daily cybersecurity challenges. Users can solve challenges, earn points, and compete on the leaderboard.

Platform Highlights

In the first 10 days post-launch, CTFv achieved impressive metrics:

• 🎉 300+ registered users
• 🎉 2400+ challenge submissions
• 📈 Over 40k requests processed, with a peak of 8.5k requests in one day
• 📈 19.85M rows read and 6.95k rows written in the database, handling 26.92k read and 3.75k write queries
• ⏰ Zero downtime throughout the launch period

Features

1. Daily Cybersecurity Challenges:

   • New security puzzles released daily to keep skills sharp
   • Varying difficulty levels to accommodate beginners and experts

2. User-Friendly Dashboard:

   • Track progress and completion status of challenges
   • Monitor personal scores and ranking on the leaderboard

3. Competitive Leaderboard:

   • Real-time rankings based on challenge completions and points
   • Encourages healthy competition among cybersecurity enthusiasts

4. Robust Admin Interface:

   • Easy challenge management for administrators
   • Comprehensive analytics on user engagement and platform performance

5. Scalable Architecture:

   • Built to handle high traffic with no performance degradation
   • Serverless design ensures reliability and minimal maintenance

Tech Stack

• Frontend: React with TailwindCSS & shadCN UI for a clean and responsive design.
• Backend: Hono.js running on Cloudflare Workers with a Cloudflare D1 SQLite database and Drizzle as the ORM.

For more detailed information about the project, check out the CTFv GitHub repository.