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VolgaCTF Qualifier External Task Checker Protocol (ETCP)

VolgaCTF Qualifier is a platform for task-based CTF competitions. This document introduces a protocol to check an answer to a task.

Call for a change

The current system has only one way to specify a correct answer / a limited number of correct answers to a task. Nonetheless, some types of problems (e.g. cryptography) may be solved in a variety of ways, which may result in a great many valid answers for a single task.

A new protocol

An external task checker (ETC) is a REST web service.

An ETC runs on a public FQDN[:port]. For instance, the FQDN might look like task.checker.qualifier.volgactf.org.

An ETC accepts requests from a VolgaCTF Qualifier master server (VQMS) and provides a response indicating whether a provided answer is correct or not.

Authentication

The VQMS makes use of HTTP Basic Authentication to authenticate itself to an ETC. Additionaly, an ETC may require that VQMS starts a secure (HTTPS) connection. Last but not the least, an ETC may accept connections only from a limited set of IP adresses.

Note. The aforementioned measures may be implemented by a load-balancing server like Nginx. In a nutshell, a basic ETC may lack authentication & security features at all.

Heartbeat

This request may be made by the VQMS to check an ETC availability status.

Request

GET /check
Host: task.checker.qualifier.volgactf.org

Response

HTTP/1.1 204 No Content

Check

Request

POST /check
Host: task.checker.qualifier.volgactf.org
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "answer": "SOME FLAG"
}

Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "answer": "SOME FLAG",
  "result": true|false,
  "comment": "Try harder!"
}

Web server process(es)

There may be launched several instances (processes) of an ETC. A process monitoring system (e.g. Supervisor) should provide an ETC start script with the following environment variables:

  • HOST
  • PORT
  • INSTANCE

INSTANCE number will be used to calculate a port number to listen to. For example, the first process will be launched with these environment variables: HOST=127.0.0.1 PORT=3000 INSTANCE=0, and the second one with these ones: HOST=127.0.0.1 PORT=3000 INSTANCE=1. According to these settings, processes will listen to ports 3000 and 3001 respectively.

Note. In a modern Linux system, one may take advantage of REUSE_PORT socket option.

Other requirements

To have a similar interface, it is suggested to put all scripts in script folder. The following script names are reserved and should be used only for certain purposes:

  1. [Required] server - web server launch script;
  2. [Optional] bootstrap - project setup;
  3. [Optional] console - CLI;

License

MIT @ VolgaCTF