rCDS - A CTF Challenge Deployment Tool
rCDS is redpwn’s CTF challenge deployment tool. It is designed to automate the entire challenge deployment process, taking sources from challenge authors and provisioning the necessary resources to both make challenges available on the competition scoreboard and to spin up Docker containers that the challenge needs to run.
rCDS has an opinionated model for managing CTF challenges. It operates on a centralized challenge repository and is designed to be run from a CI/CD system. This repository is the single source of truth for all data about challenges, and rCDS itself essentially acts as a tool to sync the state of various systems (the scoreboard and the container runtime) to what is described by this repository. Authors do not directly interface with any of these systems, and instead push their changes and let a CI job apply them. Thus, the challenge repository can be versioned, creating an audit log of all changes and allowing for point-in-time rollbacks of everything regarding a challenge should something go wrong.
If you are a challenge author for a CTF using rCDS, head over to the challenge config format docs.
rCDS’s mode of operation is optimized for a CI environment. After validating all challenges’ configurations, rCDS runs in 4 stages:
Build all challenge containers, as needed, and upload to a remote container registry
Collect all files to upload to competitors
Push the containers over to a container runtime
Render descriptions and push all relevant data to a scoreboard
At its core, rCDS only handles building the Docker containers and preparing all assets for a challenge (description, files, etc.)—everything else is handled by a backend.
rCDS does not rely on any system dependencies other than its Python dependencies. It does not shell out to system commands for performing any operations, and thus does not need the Docker CLI installed; it just needs to be able to connect to a Docker daemon.
GitLab CI
rCDS recommends running CI/CD on GitLab CI, because it allows for manual job
runs and tracking deployments in an “environment”, which enables easy rollbacks
in case anything goes wrong. It also has well-documented support for performing
Docker image builds on
Gitlab.com. On Gitlab.com’s shared runners, Docker builds can be run by running
the docker:dind service and setting the DOCKER_HOST environment variable
to tcp://docker:2375—with this variable set, rCDS does not need to run on
the docker image; you can use python or any other image with a working
pip (e.g. google/cloud-sdk:slim).
Note
An example .gitlab-ci.yml:
image: python:3.8
services:
- docker:dind
variables:
DOCKER_HOST: tcp://docker:2375
before_script:
- pip3 install rcds
deploy:
when: manual
environment:
name: production
script:
- rcds deploy
You may need additional options to run various deployment backends; see an example using GKE and rCTF.
Contents
Backends