Indian Capture the Flag Junior (InCTFj)

Indian Capture the Flag Junior or InCTFj, as I will be referring to throughout this article, is a Jeopardy-type hacking competition. In contrast to its cousin attack-defence capture the flags, these types of competition follow the format of giving puzzle sort to speak and the object is to get a flag usually in the format *ctf{@@@@} where the ‘*’ is the CTF name and ‘@@@@’ is some text. To be completely honest, these puzzles are extremely hard and require you to think way outside the box and learn more than before. We had to learn many things which people admitted to were very hard.

InCTF was the dream child of Vipin Pavithran as he was embarrassed that India for being highly populated and high in IT sector jobs, had no teams (in 2008), so he made team bi0s, and setup InCTF to bring attention to CTF in India. Now as of 2018, India has 214 Internationally positioned teams as per ctftime.org, with Vipin sir’s team bi0s being first on the Indian stage and 30^th on the world stage, which is an achievement by itself.

As a note, the members of bi0s are extremely talented in their respective skill

Though the toughness was there, the competition was still interesting and required competitors to have some skills in computer science, programming and math. We learn many things from there as Cryptography, SQL injection, Assembly Code (The Mother to All Higher Level Programming Languages) and much more.

The preliminaries were pretty hard, to say the least. With me looking through the depts of the internet to understand some of the concepts. But I was able to understand some of it but Rayhan helped me with understanding the rest

I had genuinely didn’t expect to be in the top 5 for the prelims and was ecstatic. After that point, I did a little more research to study

The camp though its timing inconvenient was most educational and I made friends last a lifetime.  Though most of us went to the finals to win, during the days of the camp where teach each other our strengths and learned from others our weaknesses, in fact, if it weren’t for a tool a competitor by the name of username r4j1337 and real name Raj (Never caught his last name :P), I think the finals would have been much harder. The final on the other hand was a Huge Headache and I am still doubting how I got 8^th position on the national stage.

It was an experience that was worth the trouble and I thank the members of bi0s, Vipin sir, Amrita University and all the other contestants for the memorable time and for sharing knowledge and I send my wish for bi0s to reach the heights they aim for.

“PLUS ULTRA”