Empowering Cybersecurity Education: Designing a CTF Platform Using Kubernetes
Marcus Sebastian E. Holmgaard, Mai S. A. Odgaard, and Thea U. Kjeldsmark
Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS) Conference Student Poster, 2024
The potential of Capture the Flag (CTF) platforms is often confined by the issue of accessibility and complex setup. Most platforms are either closed-sourced or complicated to configure, which can be frustrating and time-consuming for organizers. Our research addresses these issues by exploring the feasibility of designing a user-friendly and high-performing CTF platform that utilizes a container orchestration tool to manage users and challenges. We propose Haaukernetes, an open-source CTF platform that uses Kubernetes, a container orchestration tool, to improve setup and container management while still maintaining high availability and security.
We design Haaukernetes by first outlining the advantages of choosing Kubernetes. Then, we map the different CTF concepts to Kubernetes concepts to provide a foundation for our architecture and design choices. Since CTF challenges involve vulnerable applications, we examine and test network policies that isolate users. We also discuss different setup methods and conclude that Kubernetes provides additional flexibility, allowing various distribution methods.
To understand the performance of Haaukernetes, we carry out performance tests, which indicate that the memory usage scales linearly with the number of users, demonstrating the platform’s ability to handle increasing user loads efficiently. Based on our architecture and results, we compare Haaukernetes to the open-source CTF platform Haaukins, which differs in not using a container orchestration tool. While Haaukernetes and Haaukins offer similar user functionalities, we conclude that using Kubernetes allows us to add additional features and significantly reduces setup time and codebase complexity, which can empower more organizers to set up CTF events.