ASEAN Student Contest 2024: third prize in Attack-Defense

On October 19, 2024 I played the Attack-Defense final of the 17th ASEAN Student Contest on Information Security at the Military Technical Academy in Hanoi, with team PTIT.Celebi. We got third prize. PTIT’s other team got third prize in the Jeopardy bracket on the same day.

The two PTIT teams at the awards ceremony.

This was my second A&D final. In the first one, in 2023, our services stayed up but we patched too slowly and lost a lot of flags, so patching faster was what I wanted to improve this time.

Final board. PTIT.Celebi is 6th with 6,812.92 points.

We finished 6th on the board with 6,812.92 points, which was enough for third prize. There were two services, Linkextractor 2.0 and pepeviewer.

On Linkextractor our SLA was 91.30%. We captured 159 flags and lost 231. On pepeviewer we captured 651 flags, our best attack result of the day, but we lost 433 and the SLA was 71.36%. So compared to 2023 our attack was much better, but defense on pepeviewer was still weak, and the service was down or vulnerable for too much of the game.

PTIT.Celebi with the third prize.

Third prize in my second A&D final was a good result. The next A&D final I played was M*CTF 2025 in Moscow.