LiveCTF-DEFCON34

LiveCTF-DEFCON34 is the infrastructure codebase for LiveCTF, a bot-programming competition that ran at DEF CON 34, a major hacking and security conference. In this competition, teams write programs (called bots) that run on a custom made computer architecture, and those bots compete against each other in a game. This repository is now an archive. Qualifier data including the database, API snapshots, replays, and the bots themselves is available in a public Google Cloud Storage bucket linked from the README.

The code is written in Rust and split into six crates. The emulator crate runs the custom architecture that bots execute on. The game-engine crate contains the game logic and simulation rules. The driver crate runs bots against each other using the game engine. The coordinator crate fetches game data and bot binaries, invokes the driver, and reports results. The api crate is a web service that teams and organizers use to register bots, create games, and view results. The game crate is a visualizer for watching games replay.

Deployment uses Terraform to provision servers on Hetzner Cloud and Ansible to configure them. There are separate staging and production environments. A command-line tool lets organizers manage teams, upload bot binaries, create and start games, and check results through an SSH tunnel to the API. GitHub Actions handles continuous integration and production releases gated by a required reviewer.

The development setup requires Rust, a PostgreSQL database, and a handful of Linux system libraries. The README is written for organizers running the infrastructure, not for participants. It is a detailed operational guide covering first-time setup through day-to-day game management commands. This is a niche codebase that would interest people running similar bot-game competition systems or studying how live CTF infrastructure is built.