PBCTF 4.0: An Inherited Dream
Every institution is fragile, not because it lacks rules or foundation, but because it depends on memory, and one thing about memory is that it fades easily. What remains at the end is not the scoreboard or glory or the challenges. What remains is the intention, the collective decision to make something out of nothing.
PBCTF is one such creation. It wasn't born out of resources, but the refusal of some people not to give up on the coming generations of kids attending this college. They say that every generation of students inherits something from their seniors, and it was PBCTF to us. A CTF that was born out of curiosity, 3 iterations before us. PBCTF is very personal because we didn't begin as organizers. We remember the first time we felt curious, hopeful, and not scared to dream. I also remember the first time we solved a challenge, the first time we saw our names on the scoreboard. These events were never about winning for us(even though we did win), it was more about belonging, knowing even in this small corner of the college that crushes you every day, someone created a stage where curiosity matters most.
When Samrath and Sumukh (my seniors) asked us to host PBCTF 4.0, there was no hesitation. What we once received as a moment that altered our college lives (probably even after college), it was now our turn to take it forward. We were asked to take PBCTF from being an intra-college to an inter-college event, and even open it to anyone willing to show up. This would be the biggest thing we've ever done.
This blog is not a manual in a technical sense. You can find a million articles/tutorials on CTFd, server deployments, and containerizing challenges. All these things are extremely important too, but they are only the skin, not the soul. This blog will tell you how you can ensure this CTF doesn't dissolve after you, and how to give it a form without suffocating it.
The Beginnings
Every PBCTF begins with a question that is not practical but almost ethical: why should this exist? If you start with “because others are doing it,” the event will collapse the moment you face difficulty. If you start with “because it will look good on my résumé,” the event will feel hollow. For us, it was clear. We were taking forward what we loved
The People
Do not romanticize teamwork, but do not underestimate it either. A CTF is not built by the brilliant loner; it is built by fragments of commitment stitched together. One person writes the crypto challenge at 2 AM, another configures the server quietly, and another negotiates with the department to secure permissions.
Yet, fragility lies here. The greatest risk is not technical failure but human withdrawal. You must learn to cultivate trust, not through big speeches but through small reliability. PBCTF survives not because everyone is talented, but because enough people refuse to abandon it when it is inconvenient.
Infrastructure
There is beauty in stability. Do not be tempted by unnecessary complexity. A CTF does not gain depth from flashy design or endless categories, but from reliability, the scoreboard that does not fall, the challenges that do not vanish when solved. CTFd suffices. A server suffices. Test everything twice. Trust that elegance comes not from excess but from the minimal made durable.
Time
The greatest enemy of PBCTF is not difficulty but lateness. Begin earlier than you think necessary. The invisible labour of writing, testing, debugging, and documenting consumes more time than enthusiasm predicts.
Think of time not as a resource but as an atmosphere: if rushed, the event suffocates; if given space, it breathes. A timeline is not merely organizational, it is ethical, because it respects both the participants and the organizers.
Spirit
Do not mistake competition for hostility. PBCTF is not about defeating others, but about creating an arena where learning disguises itself as play. The best challenges are not those that humiliate, but those that awaken curiosity.
The true flag is not the string submitted, but the moment when a participant feels the possibility crack open when they realize they are capable of more than they thought. To host PBCTF is to give strangers this invisible gift.
Legacy
The most difficult part of PBCTF is not hosting it, but ensuring it outlives you. Every batch assumes that what exists will naturally continue, yet history proves otherwise: projects vanish, clubs dissolve, traditions fade.
The antidote is documentation. Not just of passwords and repositories, but of intentions, mistakes, and reflections. Leave behind both the bones (technical details) and the soul (why it mattered). PBCTF must never depend on memory alone.
Here is the link to every single thing made for PBCTF 4.0: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1TSS8PkC-8rf72LWbjwuTVrmvUWXHquWE?usp=sharing
The following link contains writeups to the challenges: https://github.com/pbdsce/pbctf4.0-writeups
Here is how PBCTF 4.0 went and what you can learn from it
We started planning a month earlier, fixed dates, booked classrooms to host, and started looking for sponsors. We opened the registration almost a month before the event, thanks to our dev team, who had the registration form ready in no time. All the background work for the event was getting ready, except for the heart of the CTF, the questions!
A team of seven of us decided to assemble at our place in an attempt to start making questions, but as anticipated, our first get-together turned into more of a social hangout, chatting, playing UNO, and going out for a short lunch. Before we knew it, it was dinner time, and we had to head back. A day in hope of productivity wasted, well, not completely. We at least managed to discuss ideas for a few challenges, how to structure them, the concepts behind them, and who would tackle which domain. The plan was to have a few questions ready by the next offline meeting, which would be around two weeks before the event.
Our next meetings were slightly more productive (though still noisy and full of chatter). We started sorting out questions and even decided to add some new domains this year, like cloud and AI. The last week before PBCTF 4.0 saw multiple frantic meet-ups. We still didn’t have enough completed questions spread across domains, so Yuktha and Chetan joined the team to speed things up. Those days were all about fixing, tweaking, and getting the questions done. The final day before the CTF was jam-packed, finalising the list of challenges, completing half-finished ones, and testing everything alongside the infra to avoid hiccups. Sometimes, we end up having silly ones like mismatched flag formats, wrong files, broken hosting, you name it.
And, honestly, it still wasn’t done 😅. On the CTF day, we were still handling last-minute hosting, routing challenges correctly, and collecting team data to distribute credentials for the cloud challenges. The first half of the event ended up being just as intense for us organisers as it was for the players.
The most exciting moment of the day was when the CTF platform went down just a few minutes after it went live, most probably it was a database migration issue if my memory serves me right, obviously the DevOps team has the better context but for a moment(or more) it was chaos at their end, luckily they had a backup server hosting the same instance, we made the participants switch over within minutes and and it wasn’t quite or any troublesome for them. The infra stayed rock solid for the rest of the event. Complete credit to the DevOps team for managing it smoothly, especially Govind, who was practically on the verge of tears during that initial scare.
Oh, and we almost forgot to mention about our juniors, who played the most important part, they took over the promotions and marketing aspects completely on their shoulders. They even did a whirlwind Bangalore tour across colleges to spread the word. They put their heart into this, which showed in the number of registrations we had for the event.
The second half of the event, post lunch, is when the real fun began. We had slipped in a special challenge titled “We Are Broke”. The challenge displayed a UPI QR code with a payment link for ₹19. Participants could either pay the amount to instantly get the flag or go hunting around the site to find it hidden elsewhere.
The hint was pretty straightforward, yet around 40–50 teams actually paid the ₹19 to get their flag. Watching that unfold had everyone in splits! Easily the most hilarious moment of the CTF.
Later in the day, a few of us caught up with the seniors and the founding members of our club who had taken time out from their work to come and support the event, while others wandered across the dozen labs the participants were spread out across, helping teams who did have a ton of queries.
The event wrapped up with a closing ceremony at PC Sagar, and we then headed to Hemang’s place for our usual after-party, which actually didn't quite end well, but that’s a story for another blog.
Conclusion: The True Flag
Hosting PBCTF will test you. It will leave you tired, perhaps disillusioned. But disillusionment is itself a teacher. It reveals what truly matters. In the end, you will realize that the scoreboard, the challenges, and the server logs are not the event. The event is the bond formed between those who dared to build it, and the quiet transformations inside those who played it.
Do not think of PBCTF as yours. Think of it as something entrusted to you temporarily, something you must pass on with greater strength than you received it. In that sense, PBCTF is less a competition than a form of resistance against conformity, against stagnation, against the slow erosion of curiosity.,
And if you succeed, years from now, someone you will never meet will solve their first flag under the name PBCTF. They will not know your struggles, nor remember your name. But the moment will exist because you carried it forward. That is enough.