CTF101: Opensourcing Google's Top Search for CTF Content
Humble Beginnings
I found the site back in high school actually. Back then, we just started our first CTF team and were looking for any resource we could to improve. I got my shit rocked in CSAW’18 and picoCTF. Obviously, the stuff they had in Cyberpatriot isn’t comparable at all to what ctfs were.
“you’re telling me we’re actually USING John the Ripper instead of just deleting it? Wild.”
CTF101.org was just a passing stop on the way to look for resources. I think it was pretty useful for me back then since I wasn’t fully exposed to all the categories yet. I didn’t know shit about C, let alone reversing it. Nevertheless, it was a part of my high school life, and it (kinda) influenced me to take a closer look at how CTFs were like.
“Is there a checklist for this?”
Problems
CTF101 was the brain child of OSIRIS and its members back in 2015-2016 (approx.) It was probably the first attempt at “wiki-fying” the competition. Obviously, as the authors of CSAW, one of the oldest security competitions in the world, it only made sense for OSIRIS to have materials for it.
Back then, it was actually planned to integrate all the CSAW challenges since 2012 as sort of “practice material” to supplement the meat and bones of the documents.
Well, problem was: no one cared enough to maintain it.
The last commit for the page was 6 years before I took a crack at it!
Open for business.
I’ve never open sourced a project, let alone someone else’s project. However, there were lot of resources available for me. Following through these steps @ opensource.guide, I got a good idea what I needed to do.
After half a day of going through LICENSEs and CONTRIBUTING.md, the site was pretty much ready, and by the end of the day, it was released.
Closing thoughts
It was fulfilling going back in time to work on a project that I used years ago. Not gonna lie, I have no idea whether or not newbies would look at this ever again. But at least, it’ll hopefully get Trail of Bits to update their stuff too.
^ this is “mostly” true. Thanks trail…