CTF stands for "Capture the Flag". CTFs are a type of computer security competition. Certain pieces of information, called "flags", are placed on servers, encrypted, hidden, or otherwise stored somewhere difficult to access. During the competition, different challenges are released which allow the participants to reverse engineer, break, hack, decrypt, and do whatever it takes to capture that flag. When a team submits this flag to a scoring page, they get points for the submission.

vishwaCTF is the Flagship event of CyberCell, VIIT. At its inception, it was the first CTF from Maharashtra, India and also, the second one from India organized independently by any college. This is now the 5th Edition of the annually organized vishwaCTF, and the second time that it is being held globally.

VishwaCTF is the Flagship event of CyberCell, VIIT. At its inception, it was the first CTF from Maharashtra, India and also, the second one from India organized independently by any college. We host VishwaCTF-mini as a practice CTF before the real deal!

The competition is designed specially for beginners to be able to learn various new concepts while enjoying the competition, not being too overwhelmed with it. As such, anyone in High-School or a higher form of education should be able to cope fairly easily. Otherwise, any person can participate with a basic knowledge of using a computer and the internet for searching stuff.

We love Computer Science and CTFs. Competing in CTFs is one of our favorite things to do. Unfortunately, there aren't many CTFs out there designed for beginners. We found that we learned a lot about computer security very quickly by particating in CTFs. vishwaCTF will teach participants about other areas of computer science as well. vishwaCTF is meant to follow up on the success of CTFs like picoCTF and HSCTF.

Challenges will vary widely in difficulty. We expect some challenges to be solved by every team, and others to be solved by only a few teams. All teams have the potential of performing very well in this competition even with no CTF experience. We hope vishwaCTF will be a fun, learning experience for all the participants.

Full participation in the competition requires only a computer with a Web Browser (Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer 9+, etc.), an internet connection and the ability to install applications.

There will be several dozen challenges, each worth an appropriate number of points based on its difficulty. The points of a challenge are determined by the number of participants able to solve that challenge. For example, a challenge with 100 solves will have lower points than one with just 10 solves. You may read more about the Dynamic Scoring of the CTFd platform here.

When you solve a problem, you send your answer (or 'key', or 'flag') to a scoring server, which adds the problem's value to your team's score. At the end of the competition the team(s) with the highest scores are the winners. Time will be used as a tie-breaker. Note: All teams are assigned same points for solving any particular problem, irrespective of the time they solved the problem at. Tie-breakers will be decided by how fast the team reached their final score.

Participants in the CTF must abide by a few common sense rules that ensure the competition is fair. These rules are copied from picoCTF's FAQ: Attacking the scoring server, other teams, or machines not explicitly designated as targets is cheating. This includes both breaking into such machines and denying others access to them (for example, by altering a key or ping-flooding). Sharing keys or providing overly-revealing hints with other teams is cheating, as is being directly assisted by personnel outside the team (using tools from the internet is OK; asking people on the internet to help you solve the problem is not). We encourage you to solve problems in novel and creative ways using all available resources, but we do require that you solve them yourselves.

VishwaCTF is organized by students of Vishwakarma Institute of Information Technology, Pune, India as part of the CyberCell club of the college.

Yes! Look at picoCTF, organized by Carnegie Mellon University, or CSAW RED, organized by the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, or HSCTF, organized by the West Windsor-Plainsboro High School North, New Jersey.