Competitions Galore
We were involved in organizing quite a few online competitions in March during Srishti and Cognizance. All of them occurred in the same week. This resulted in a very hectic, but fun experience. Here’s a brief overview of the contests.
backdoorCTF - A Jeopardy Style CTF Event
SDSLabs organised the first ever Capture the Flag (CTF) event by IIT Roorkee from March 9th to 11th as an event in Cognizance, the technical festival of IIT Roorkee. The idea was proposed by Vaibhav Gautam from the Saharanpur Campus. CTF are cyber security events which focus on a plethora of problems found in the real world. The event saw participation from contestants all over the world, with some really experienced hackers participating in the contest.
On our side, we had a lot of fun putting the event together. It was great to host and we learnt as much as the teams that participated. With mid terms ending on 4th, we had only 4 days to put the whole event together. We divided ourselves into groups based on categories of questions and got hacking. Three sleepless nights later, we had ourselves something to speak of.
Not knowing what kind of participation to expect, the questions that we set varied across difficulty levels.The challenges for this CTF spanned from simple trivia questions to questions that required detailed knowledge of modern computer security techniques. We also held interactive discussion with the participants on the irc channel # backdoorctf.
There were some really nerve-wracking moments in the final 6 hours of the contest. The competition saw multiple leadeboard changes, with it ending in a nail biting finale where Team dcua (World Rank 15 on CTFTime) snatched the lead from team v3l0cityz3r0 in the final moments. Team h34dump (World Rank 46) brought up the rear, taking the third place. We are proud to add that Team v3l0cityz3r0 included a student of IIT Roorkee among others.
In conclusion, we would like to congratulate all winners and those who participated, helping us make this event a grand success! We will be back with a bigger and better backdoorCTF next year, we promise.
Codematics
Codematics is a Project Euler-style mathematical puzzle solving competition, held annually as an event in Srishti, the Hobbies Club exhibition. It was organized by the Programming and Algorithm group, under SDSLabs.
The competition consisted of multiple levels of difficulty, with the challenges of a certain level only being accessible after the preceding levels had been completed. There were a wide variety of problems, and solving them required high mathematical and computational skills. Incidentally, the final problem did full justice to its name (beta, tumse na ho payega), and remained unsolved till the end of the competition.
The competition attracted widespread participation, with students from both outside and within the campus participating. Archit Sachdeva (MCA 2nd year,IIT Delhi) was the winner, whereas Saurabh Paliwal (CS 3rd year) was the campus winner.
Insomnia
Insomnia is IIT Roorkee’s annual algorithmic problem solving event, organized by the Programming and Algorithms group, under SDSLabs. Insomnia involves all kinds of algorithmic challenges, ranging from string manipulation to complex dynamic programming. It is the biggest online event in Cognizance with participation from all over the world.
This year Insomnia was held on SDSLabs’ very own app, CodeVillage, for the first time. It gave us a chance to step up CodeVillage from the intranet to the internet. Our homegrown code-checker, called ‘CodeRunner’ was used as the grader.
The competition saw great participation from all over the world. 8 out of the first 10 ranked teams were from outside India. Anton Lunyov, from Ukraine and flashmt from Singapore took ranks 1 and 2. ‘:P‘ (yes, that’s their team name), a team comprising of Dipit Grover and Tarun Goyal won the campus prize.
Organising competitions at an International scale has been an honor for us. We hope to continue bringing forward events of these level, if not more, in the future!
Team SDSLabs