VolgaCTF: summing up the first round
March 25-27, the correspondence round of information security team competition VolgaCTF 2016 was held. And today we are publishing the results.
This year, the championship was held under the banner of the fight for free software: participants were asked to find information about the GAI artificial intelligence developed by enthusiastic scientists. The greedy corporation, which created its commercial alternative to BAI, tried to hide all the traces of a free competitor, but that was not the case! Traces could be found by solving tasks that this year were laid out in random order, and not by increasing the number of points, as before.
To communicate with the organizers and inter-team chat, a bot was wired into Telegram, which many participants, by the way, took for their personal guardian angel, filling it with “answer” and “flag” messages. Some seemed to be trying to persuade the bot, sending such messages over and over.
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A bit of dry statistics: in the previous article ( habrahabr.ru/post/280043 ) we showed that the number of participants is growing every year. This year has met expectations - the total number of registered teams has increased to 749, of which 668 confirmed their participation. 452 participating teams attempted to solve tasks by sending responses to the server. 199 of them finished the competition with a non-zero result.
The maximum number of points for the task is 6260. On average (or rather, by the median), the teams scored 600 or more points. 102 teams have risen above this figure. In general, points are distributed from 10 (the minimum number of points was awarded for the Qiuz task) to 4860 (the leaders of the correspondence stage finished with this amount). The second diagram shows that quite a large number of teams (49 is a quarter of the “effective” teams) solved one or two serious tasks and stopped there.
It is interesting to look at the geographical distribution of participants (information was taken from the registration data and from the profiles of teams on the site ctftime.org). By the number of participants, the first place is predictably occupied by Russia (165 teams). 108 teams have identified themselves as "international". There are also many teams from the USA, Japan, and South Korea.
There are also unexpected countries, for example, Mongolia (5 teams), North Korea (2 teams). The Micronesian team, however, turned out to be Iran on a closer look. (A small offtopic: when writing this fragment, the author visited the idea to review and analyze the geography of participants in world CTF competitions. It is quite unusual to see a dozen teams from seemingly no different special achievements in the IT industry in Vietnam. If any of the readers have their own thoughts on this topic, share them in the comments)
The first places in the qualifying round were taken by experienced teams, CTF veterans. Three finalists looks like this:
1) First place - dcua (Ukraine), 4860 points.
2) EpicFairPlay, they are also SUSlo.PAS (Russia), 4810 points
3) Bushwhackers (Russia), 4610 points.
Of the new names, we can mention the Destructive Voice (10th place) and the HETTO team (6th place), which previously participated in only a few competitions. The twelfth team in the list of finalists, int3pids from Spain, scored 3400 points.
According to preliminary information, 5 Volga teams (Samara, Saratov, Penza), 4 teams from other regions (from Novosibirsk, Moscow, Tomsk and Yekaterinburg) and 3 foreign teams (from the USA and Ukraine) will take part in a full-time tour.
It was fascinating to watch the competition, thanks to all the participants! Detailed solutions of tasks may be published on Habré or the official website, but for now, curious people can look at solutions from teams via the link ctftime.org/event/279/tasks . See you in the final round!
This year, the championship was held under the banner of the fight for free software: participants were asked to find information about the GAI artificial intelligence developed by enthusiastic scientists. The greedy corporation, which created its commercial alternative to BAI, tried to hide all the traces of a free competitor, but that was not the case! Traces could be found by solving tasks that this year were laid out in random order, and not by increasing the number of points, as before.
To communicate with the organizers and inter-team chat, a bot was wired into Telegram, which many participants, by the way, took for their personal guardian angel, filling it with “answer” and “flag” messages. Some seemed to be trying to persuade the bot, sending such messages over and over.
')
A bit of dry statistics: in the previous article ( habrahabr.ru/post/280043 ) we showed that the number of participants is growing every year. This year has met expectations - the total number of registered teams has increased to 749, of which 668 confirmed their participation. 452 participating teams attempted to solve tasks by sending responses to the server. 199 of them finished the competition with a non-zero result.
The maximum number of points for the task is 6260. On average (or rather, by the median), the teams scored 600 or more points. 102 teams have risen above this figure. In general, points are distributed from 10 (the minimum number of points was awarded for the Qiuz task) to 4860 (the leaders of the correspondence stage finished with this amount). The second diagram shows that quite a large number of teams (49 is a quarter of the “effective” teams) solved one or two serious tasks and stopped there.
It is interesting to look at the geographical distribution of participants (information was taken from the registration data and from the profiles of teams on the site ctftime.org). By the number of participants, the first place is predictably occupied by Russia (165 teams). 108 teams have identified themselves as "international". There are also many teams from the USA, Japan, and South Korea.
There are also unexpected countries, for example, Mongolia (5 teams), North Korea (2 teams). The Micronesian team, however, turned out to be Iran on a closer look. (A small offtopic: when writing this fragment, the author visited the idea to review and analyze the geography of participants in world CTF competitions. It is quite unusual to see a dozen teams from seemingly no different special achievements in the IT industry in Vietnam. If any of the readers have their own thoughts on this topic, share them in the comments)
The first places in the qualifying round were taken by experienced teams, CTF veterans. Three finalists looks like this:
1) First place - dcua (Ukraine), 4860 points.
2) EpicFairPlay, they are also SUSlo.PAS (Russia), 4810 points
3) Bushwhackers (Russia), 4610 points.
Of the new names, we can mention the Destructive Voice (10th place) and the HETTO team (6th place), which previously participated in only a few competitions. The twelfth team in the list of finalists, int3pids from Spain, scored 3400 points.
According to preliminary information, 5 Volga teams (Samara, Saratov, Penza), 4 teams from other regions (from Novosibirsk, Moscow, Tomsk and Yekaterinburg) and 3 foreign teams (from the USA and Ukraine) will take part in a full-time tour.
It was fascinating to watch the competition, thanks to all the participants! Detailed solutions of tasks may be published on Habré or the official website, but for now, curious people can look at solutions from teams via the link ctftime.org/event/279/tasks . See you in the final round!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/281661/
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