A step by step guide on how to deploy and load test scalable containers on a k8 cluster!
There is only one thing that CTF participants hate more than a boring CTF: a CTF with challenges that keep going down :)
Deploying CTF challenges is different from any normal server deployment or DevOps job because you’re intentionally deploying services that are vulnerable to break, and you got to be ready with fallback measures to minimize downtime when that does happen.
That’s what we had in mind while we picked using Kubernetes to deploy challenges for csictf 2020. …
Statistics/infra details from a real CTF to efficiently plan infra for your CTF!
About csictf 2020
csictf 2020 was a 4-day CTF, held from 18 July 2020 to 22 July 2020, and hosted over 1400 teams! Since we anticipated high traffic as it was a CTF targeted towards newcomers, we knew that it would be crucial to structure our infra correctly.
The main goals while planning infrastructure for the CTF were :
a) 100% (or close to :) ) uptime for both the CTF platform and all the challenges.
b) efficiently size cloud machines to minimize cloud credits spent.
c) ensure that the…
Introduction
This article is a part of a series describing the work that went into setting up the infra for csictf 2020. In this post, we’ll be going over how we set up the CTFd platform. Since this is a CTF, we also talk about some extra tips to configure:
- Rate limiting requests on the server, to mitigate brute-force/DDOS attacks
- A firewall to only allow connections on some ports
- SSL certificates (https) for the server
- Logging requests correctly to trace back illegitimate activity
The CTFd Platform
CTFd is a popular open-source platform used by many CTF events. It’s easy to use, and has a…
