Winja CTF 2021 — Embracing Diversity

6 min readMar 12, 2021

Prologue

It was the end of Nullcon 2020. The physical edition of Winja CTF 2020 competition had just ended. We had only women participants back then. Was it too early to start planning for the next CTF? Not if you have your heart and soul into it.

After a few exchange of ideas and conversations with Antriksh over a period of few months, I was clear that our imagination was the only limit and that we were free to explore any idea that we might have. Having the assurance that someone has my back was a great feeling and a morale booster.

Team Building

We started building a core team to work with. Shreya was introduced to me via Antriksh, and I must say that she has been a great support in all Winja activities. I contacted Dhaval and Ayush as they had contributed significantly during Winja CTF 2020. They are the ones who suggested the idea of a smart city for Winja CTF 2021.

Who else? To implement our ideas, we needed more people. Who was going to build the CTF challenges for us?

We released a form on social media platforms, asking volunteers to join us. We received approximately 30 responses. We asked these 30 people and a few others to create and submit a simple CTF challenge for us. The intention was to assess who could be a good fit for our CTF team. We received only four responses in this second round. The most impressive submission came from Aravindha.

I also started spreading the word about our upcoming CTF in my own capacity. During SECCON 2020 conference, I had an opportunity to interact with Asuka from CTF for Girls community in Japan. We agreed to collaborate and support each other. As part of this campaign, Winja found two more CTF contributors namely, Asuka and Tushar.

We kept making little progress every week. It was already end of January 2021, and everyone was still working on creating CTF challenges. Infrastructure was yet to be setup. Challenges were yet to be tested. Integrations were yet to be done. I started panicking.

After a discussion with Antriksh, we contacted Nullcon volunteers and asked for their support. Within the next few days, Chirag, Sartaj and Ashwin joined the Winja CTF team. From this point onward, each day was marked with significant progress and lots of geek fun. I thought to myself, “That’s it! I couldn’t have asked for anything more”.

Work Begins

Ideas started emerging at a rapid pace. We started creating newer challenges with varied difficulty levels, under various categories. Infrastructure was laid in no time, even without much prior experience in Azure environment. UI was designed and refined. CTFd platform was setup with customised pages. Winja website was kept up to date. Social media was kept active. We were tackling security, performance, scalability, usability, user experience and everything else that we could think of. We were making progress every single day.

To ensure that people stay motivated and excited about our CTF, we defined more than one prize categories, as shown below:

Who Played the Game?

This year, Winja CTF was held for a good 13 hours. It started at 00:00 Hrs IST and lasted till 13:00 Hrs IST on 06th of March 2021. We started the CTF with 695 registered participants.

By the time the CTF got over, we had 883 users registered with us.

#WinjaCTF2021 — Our Support Team

We had a public voice channel setup on Discord for providing technical support during the CTF. Participants were allowed to text us or talk to us directly. For screen sharing and sensitive discussions, we maintained a private voice channel.

We had bot setup in our Discord server for fetching live scoreboard and other statistics. We also had musical bots setup for entertaining the participants who joined us on Discord.

We made sure that at least two people were available at all times for support, keeping in mind that participants from different time zones were participating in the game.

Apart from Discord, significant announcements were also being made continuously on our Twitter feed.

We made sure that women are encouraged to participate. We tried our best to ensure that everyone has a great learning experience by releasing hints for unsolved challenges during the last few remaining hours of the CTF competition.

A healthy and lively flow of discussion kept happening on Discord amongst participants and the members from the organising team.

And, The Winners Are…

It was a tough competition with three players scoring 3630 total points eventually. The winner was decided taking into account the time factor for successful challenge submissions by players.

The list of our top 20 scorers was shared with the Salesforce team for job consideration.

We Appreciate And Relish the Feedback Received From Our Participants

Even though some of the challenges were left unsolved, the participants seemed to have a good time solving our challenges.

We received feedback via various channels from our Winja CTF 2021 participants.

A Thank You Note

All of this was possible because of the support we received from our sponsors, Salesforce and SANS, from our amazing volunteers, enthusiastic participants, and the Nullcon team. Thank you everyone!

Challenge Write-ups

Our Winja CTF 2021 participants have submitted write-ups for various challenges that they managed to solve. Some of the write-up links that were shared with us, are mentioned below:

Visit our website https://www.winja.site/ to know more about us.