Athena CTF Platform
Kubernetes-native capture-the-flag platform that provisions isolated infrastructure per event and a private challenge instance per team, with live scoring, anti-cheat, and attack-defense support.
Project Details
Client
AstraQ Cyber Defence
Year
2024
Role
Co-Founder & CTO (platform architecture and core engineering)
Status
Live
Ownership
Lead architect; built most of the platform
Technologies
The Challenge
CTF organizers need isolated, reproducible competition environments on demand, for anything from a university practice lab to a national event, without hand-building clusters. Players need every challenge instance to stay reachable, private to their team, and stable across expiry and redeploy.
The Solution
Started as a solo project in 2024 and grew into AstraQ's flagship product. An organizer control plane provisions each event through a Go service built on the Helm SDK. Every event gets its own player app and database. A Rust gRPC runner launches per-team challenge instances on AWS ECS Fargate, which players reach through SNI routing at an Envoy Gateway, one hostname per instance. Around it sit a Rust attack-defense engine, a batch anti-cheat job, event data export, SSO, a Discord bot, and a cross-platform proxy CLI for TCP challenges.
Highlights
- Per-event isolation provisioned through the Helm SDK, with per-team challenge instances on ECS Fargate
- SNI-routed instance hostnames through Envoy Gateway that survive expiry and redeploy
- Jeopardy and attack-defense engines, anti-cheat detections, and full event data export
Outcomes
- Hosted Athena CTF 2026, a 24-hour online jeopardy CTF listed on CTFtime, for 1,200+ players across 650+ teams and 10,000+ flag submissions
- Powers Trace, a one-day OSINT CTF, and university training programmes