CompClub 2019 Summer CTF

Read the whole CompClub 2019 Summer Workshop post

GitHub: featherbear/UNSW-CompClub2019Summer-CTF
Demo: featherbear.github.io/UNSW-CompClub2019Summer-CTF

During the Winter 2018 Workshop, the organiser for the security day coded up a CTF website.

Technologies
Server: Flask (Python)
CSS: Bootstrap
Performance: RIP

Yeah so, Flask is a great Python web framework, with all of its routing magic.
But running a server with Flask alone is not a good idea…
Flask should be run in a WSGI environment, but the inbuilt Flask server is not such.
As a result, as the server load goes up, the performance goes down. Alot.

We got Gunicorn set up half-way through the competition, and it did help; but started to get CPU bottlenecks from the VPS.

Well that was fun times.

Anyway, so despite that, I had this “great” idea of also writing my own CTF site - inspired from Facebook’s CTF platform.

Technologies
Server: Tornado (Python)
CSS: Bulma

Tornado vs Flask
I could have just set up a WSGI container for Flask and called it a day, but might as well try out Tornado. I haven’t used either frameworks for a while, so I decided to use Tornado, since it was faster to set up as a non-blocking server.

Bulma vs Bootstrap
To be honest, Bootstrap is way more polished and refined than Bulma.
I decided to use Bulma because I’ve been using it for another project.
This site had components similary needed to create for that other project.
So I uh, ~~stole~~ ‘dutifully copied’ that other code for this site.

In terms of the site, it was definitely arduous and very time consuming…
But I definitely had fun designing it.

I grabbed a dotted world map, to which I could write some CSS so that the dot would grow red when hovered. But to get a whole region to light up, I had to modify the SVG map, and that meant PATH TRACING! Aaah! Results were pretty neat!