Company
Date Published
Author
Bugcrowd Researcher Success
Word count
679
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The Car Hacking Village CTF, hosted at DEF CON 25, utilized Zappa to deploy Flask-based CTFd on AWS Lambda and API Gateway, resulting in significant cost savings. The deployment was a last-minute idea conceived before the event, but research on less frequently used AWS technologies saved time. Despite initial testing and prior experience with CTFd, the team encountered a bug related to storing IP addresses as integers in a Postgres RDS instance, causing intermittent 500 responses. A test migration to change the column type resolved the issue, allowing the CTF to continue without further hiccups. The deployment handled a large volume of vulnerability scanner traffic and provided valuable learnings for future work.