CTFx

CTFx is a CTF Platform forked from mellivora, that focuses on low memory footprint and low server CPU usage. It has a futuristic interface that's optimized for slower hardware, meaning that there is no bulky Javascript running in the background, nor lengthy CSS stylesheets. CTFx improves on the mellivora CTF engine by the UI redesign and the addition of new features.

Features

• Unlimited categories and challenges with configurable dynamic/static scoring
• Challenge hints
• Unlockable challenges (In order to see them requires you to solve another challenge (from any category you choose))
• Admin Panel with competition overview, IP logging, user/email search, exception log (that includes the users that caused them)
• Create/edit front page news
• Markdown support for challenges and categories and news
• hCaptcha support
• Configurable caching
• Caching proxy (like Cloudflare) aware (optional x-forwarded-for trust)
• TOTP two factor auth support
• And more...

Looks

CTFx has a slick modern interface. See the gallery.

Performance

CTFx is extremely lightweight and fast. See the benchmarks.

Installation

- Install the following dependencies

• nginx php-fpm php-mysql php-curl php-mbstring mariadb-server (or mysql-server instead of mariadb-server)

- Secure mysql server

• Run the command mysql_secure_installation and remove anonymous users, disable root login and remove the test database

- Setup CTFx

• Clone this repository's contents to /var/www/ctfx/
• Run mkdir -p /var/www/ctfx/writable/cache
• Run chmod -R 777 /var/www/ctfx/writable

- Setup nginx

• Copy the recommended nginx config install/recommended_nginx_config to /etc/nginx/nginx.conf - For the fastcgi_pass entry, you must change the PHP version to your current one.
• Make sure to restart nginx after changing the config!

- Setup MySQL

• sudo into mysql, then run the following queries:

• CREATE DATABASE ctfx CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

• CREATE USER 'ctfx'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'ctfx_pass'; - Make sure you change the default db username and password!

• GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ctfx.* TO 'ctfx'@'%';

• exit mysql

• sudo mysql < install/sql/001-ctfx.sql

• sudo mysql < install/sql/002-countries.sql

- Create Admin User

• Register your admin account on the website (and enable 2FA Authentication preferably)
• Logout of your account
• sudo into mysql and run the query USE ctfx; UPDATE users SET admin=1 WHERE id=1;

Installation Tips:

• It is recommended that you change the default database password, and if you do so you must also change it in include/config/db.inc.php
• You can change the homepage to your liking by modifying htdocs/home.php. Make sure to also change the css rules in htdocs/css/mellivora.min.css for #ctfx-main-logo and .main-intro-text, if you want a different overall style.
• You might want to change the CTF_START_TIME and CTF_END_TIME variables in include/config/config.inc.php, so that each new challenge you create will have these times set as default.

License

This software is licenced under the GNU General Public License v3 (GPL-3). The "include/thirdparty/" directory contains third party code. Please read their LICENSE files for information on the software availability and distribution.