GitOps for Capture the Flag Platforms

2026-03-17

AI Summary

This work proposes CTF Pilot, a novel framework that introduces the GitOps paradigm to the domain of Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions for the first time. Addressing longstanding operational challenges in traditional CTF platforms—such as complex deployment workflows, inadequate version control, and limited support for high concurrency—the framework treats Git as the single source of truth and integrates infrastructure-as-code (IaC), containerization, and automated CI/CD pipelines to enable fully versioned and automated management throughout the challenge lifecycle. Empirical validation during real-world events demonstrates that CTF Pilot significantly enhances cost efficiency, ensures strong isolation under high concurrency, and improves overall system stability, thereby substantially boosting both organizer operational efficiency and participant experience.

Technology Category

• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Planning with Language Models
• Humans and AI: Crowd Sourcing and Human Computation

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: LLM based quality controls for crowd work
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Decentralized Web and Fediverse systems
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

In this paper, we present CTF Pilot, a GitOps-based framework for the deployment and management of Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions. By leveraging Git repositories as the single source of truth for challenge definitions and infrastructure configurations, CTF Pilot enables automated, version-controlled deployments that enhance collaboration among challenge authors and organizers. We detail the design criteria and implementation of CTF Pilot and evaluate our approach through a real-world CTF event, demonstrating its cost efficiency and its effectiveness in handling high participant concurrency while ensuring robust isolation and ease of challenge development. Our results indicate that CTF Pilot improves the experience for organizers and participants, and we present the lessons learned, highlighting opportunities for future improvement.

Problem

• GitOps
• Capture The Flag
• CTF platform
• challenge deployment
• infrastructure management

Innovation

• GitOps
• Capture The Flag
• automated deployment
• version-controlled infrastructure
• challenge orchestration