shareef12 / ctfview

Real-time visualization for attack-defend CTF competitions.

ctfview

ctfview provides a configurable real-time visualization for attack-defend CTF competitions. This display can be used to visualize network traffic, flag submission, or other activities occurring between teams.

Running ctfview

The ctfview web server receives events to display from a Redis publisher/subscriber queue. It is up to the CTF integrator to determine how and when events are published to this queue. A test script is provided to publish sample data.

Installation

To install ctfview, you must first install Redis and python dependencies. Redis can be installed using your distribution package manager. Alternatively, you can use the latest Redis docker image.

# Start redis
docker pull redis
docker run --name redis --rm -d -p 6379:6379 redis

# Install python dependencies
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Ensure redis is listening and can be reached from the server that will run ctfview.

Running

To run the ctfview web server, execute ctfview.py on the command line. It will begin listening on a default port of 8888.

# Run the web server
./ctfview/ctfview.py

Browse to localhost:8888 to view the visualization. The provided test.py script can be used to publish test data to the redis queue.

Integrating ctfview into a CTF

Adding teams

To add teams, modify the global TEAMS array in ctfview/ctfview.py. For each team, the following fields must be defined:

• name - Unique identifier for the team.
• display_name - Team name that will be displayed in the visualization.
• location - Relative team location. One of:
  • top-left
  • left
  • bottom-left
  • top
  • center
  • bottom
  • top-right
  • right
  • bottom-right
• color - Team color. Valid options are HTML color names, hex color codes, or RGB values.

Adding services

To add services, modify the global SERVICES array in ctfview/ctfview.py. For each service, the following fields must be defined:

• name - Unique identifier for the service.
• color - Service color. Valid options are HTML color names, hex color codes, or RGB values.

Publishing events

All events should be published to Redis "ctfview" pubsub queue. Events received from the queue will not be displayed until a configurable delay has passed. To set the delay, modify the DELAY_SECONDS variable in ctfview/ctfview.py. The delay will default to one second. Events consist of a JSON blob with the following fields:

• service - The service name corresponding to this event.
• from - The originating team name.
• to - The destination team name.
• size - Size of the event. This field is useful for depicting network traffic where each event is a packet.

It is up to the integrator to determine how to publish events to the Redis queue. In python, it is straightforward to use the redis library to do this.

redis_server = redis.StrictRedis(host=args.redis_host, port=args.redis_port, db=0)
data = {
    "service": "shipyard",
    "from": "army",
    "to": "airforce",
    "size": 5,
}
data = json.dumps(data)
redis_server.publish("ctfview", data)

By default, ctfview will use the missiles animation. To use the circles animation instead, set ANIMATION_TYPE to circle in ctfview/index.html.

Copyright

Copyright for portions of the project are held by github user sjcappella, 2015 as part of project PCDC-Display. All other copyright are held by Christian Sharpsten, 2018.