DaVinciCTF, a Cyber Security “Capture the Flag” Event Organized by Digiteam

The “CTF” (Capture the Flag) cybersecurity competition organized by DigiTeam Devinci, the Pole Leonard de Vinci’s IT association, pitted 661 international teams against each other for 48 hours, bringing together 1,000 participants.

The DaVinciCTF is the cybersecurity competition proposed by the DigiTeam student organization as part of the 4th-year industrial innovation projects of the engineering cycle. For its first edition, from 12 to 14 March 2021, the Pole Leonard de Vinci’s Capture the Flag brought together more than 1,000 participants from all over the world who located 5000 flags in the course of 27 challenges.

 CTF: Learn cybersecurity through gaming

Develop your cyber skills while having fun as a team. It’s what CTF or Capture The Flag events are all about. It is a “game” that consists of hacking opponent services. The participants, lone wolves or teams, have to solve various challenges in multiple categories depending on the scenario.

The goal is to hunt one or more vulnerabilities deliberately engineered in. After successful resolution, the participant collects a “flag” (a hidden string of characters, proof of success) and submits it to a platform to earn points and compare themselves to other participants. Of course, the more complex a challenge is, the more points it yields.

For example, a challenge can be as much a picture from which a hidden flag has to be extracted (steganography) as a website, where the player has to hack the admin’s login details.

DaVinciCTF, an online competition for all levels

To encourage people to learn about cybersecurity, the DigiTeam student association runs a competition open to everyone, whether they are beginners or experts, students or employees.

Organized in the form of a 48-hour jeopardy style event, the Davinci CTF 2021 featured 27 challenges with varying difficulty.

The competition featured eight categories: cryptography, forensics, web, reverse engineering, steganography, open-source intelligence, binary exploitation and programming.

The competition started with a live presentation by Clovis Carlier and Louis Wolfers, class of 2022, with two guests: Sasha Robert, ESILV alumni, SOC analyst at Orange France and Walter PERETTI, head of the Computer Science, Connected Objects and Security (IOS) major. Through a Virtual Private Server (VPS), over 600 international teams were able to compete online. The winning teams received $2,000 in DigitalOcean credits to share between them.

The first-place winner was Team Faust, representing the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, one of the top-ranking German universities in engineering, new technologies and computer science.

Eliott Aillerie, Lucas Becker, Samy Bontemps, Jean Loubieres, Philbert Rezmer, Matthis Villeneuve and Louis Wolfers and Katell Gourlet were among the organizers of the DaVinciCTF event.