Purpose of rCTF

Design Goals

We have designed rCTF mainly with these attributes in mind:

• performance
  • all backend services should be horizontally scalable, supporting CTF events of any size
  • time-consuming jobs should be run asynchronously, and results should be heavily cached
  • the UI should be as lightweight as possible while still looking decent
• simplicity
  • installations should be as easy as running a script
  • deployments should be as simple as creating YAML files
  • management should be made trivial using a CLI tool
• customizability
  • everything about your event is configurable through a config file
  • you can access data about your CTF through the CLI management tool.

We have also put thought into these aspects:

• integrability
  • our platform integrates with rDeploy to make challenge deployments trivial
  • rCTF supports SMTP server configuration
• high code quality
  • all PRs require a reviewer
  • we've discussed/debated every feature we've added before beginning to write code
• security
  • we're CTF folks and we (usually) aren't stupid. If you find an issue, please report it to us

What do we think about other platforms?

• most have very low performance by default, do not cache properly, or require extensive client-side analysis
• many have heavy UIs that strangle weak hardware or low-performance networks
• it is often difficult to setup other platforms, and especially to deploy challenges