Team CHiMERA from BITS Pilani K. K. Birla Goa Campus recently secured the first place in the InCTF “Capture the Flag” Style Ethical Hacking Contest organized by Amrita University. The team consisted of Aditya Bhiday, Nilesh Kulkarni, Kartik Ukhalkar, Yogesh Chidambarnathan and Rohan Anil and was mentored by Mr. Ramprasad Joshi.

The contest consisted of three rounds. The first round was the learning round where teams were given various tasks to complete. Organizers provided hints if the contestants needed them. The second round consisted of the teams attacking a vulnerable website set up by the organizers and complete as many levels as possible. This round tested the teams on web application exploits, basic logic and programming skills.

Based on the performance of the teams in the first two rounds, the top 30 teams from all over India were shortlisted for the final round which was a live “Capture the Flag” round. This round was held on 29th May 2010 and lasted five hours. The organizers set up a VPN (Virtual Private Network) server to which all the thirty teams were supposed to connect. Each team had a virtual machine acting as the Team Server which had multiple vulnerable services running on it. The goal of the contest was to exploit the services of other teams by capturing “flags” - random strings placed by the organizers and submitting them to the scoring server for “Attack” points while defending the Team Server against attacks from other teams by patching the services and making them invulnerable for “Defense” points. Teams could also publish advisories about the exploits and their patches which would gain them “Ethical” points and allow other teams to patch their own services.
Team CHiMERA emerged the winners of the final round winning a cash prize of Rs. 40,000/- and a “Champion University” award for the college. More details about the contest can be found at http://inctf.amrita.ac.in.