2.0.5 / 2019-03-23

Security

• Fixes an issue where user email addresses could be disclosed to non-admins

General

• Dockerfile now installs linux-headers package from apk
• Hidden teams are no longer visible publicly
• Fixes an issue where long content made it it difficult/impossible to edit flags and hints
• Fix for users not being able to edit portions of their own profile
• Fix for solves not being frozen for teams.
• Reimplement direct user email sending from the admin panel
• Fixes an issue where confirmation logs would report None instead of the user if the browser was unauthenticated
• Fixes an issue where SMTP server configuration (MAIL_SERVER, MAIL_PORT) were not being read from config.py
• Fixes for a user's place on their profile showing a different place than the scoreboard
• Fixes for an issue where dynamic challenge values would appear to change after being solved by a hidden user

Exports

• Exports are now saved on disk with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() instead of memory during creation
• After importing an export, CTFd will now recreate all tables it expects to be available. This resolves an issue where tables created by plugins would be missing after an import.

2.0.4 / 2019-01-30

General

• Block user & team name changes if name changes are disabled (Closes #835)
• Set accounts to unconfirmed if email is changed while verify_emails is enabled
• Only allow users to change their email to emails with domains in the whitelist.
• Add email.check_email_is_whitelisted() to verify that a user's email is whitelisted.
• Create a get_config wrapper around the internal _get_config to let us set a default config value (Closes #659)
• Remove utils.get_app_config() from memoization and also give it a default parameter
• Move utils.logging.init_logs() into utils.initialization and properly call init_logs() to save logs to the logs folder
• Block the creation of users/teams from MLC if registration_visibility is private
• Fix showing incorrect 'CTF has ended' error if view_after_ctf is set.
• Fix creating users from the admin panel while name changes are disabled.

API

• /api/v1/teams/<team_id> now coerced to an int (i.e. /api/v1/teams/<int:team_id>)

Deployment

• Re-add the LOG_FOLDER envvar to docker-compose so we don't try to write to the read-only host
• Stop gunicorn from logging to LOG_FOLDER in docker without explicit opt-in
• Add ACCESS_LOG and ERROR_LOG envvars to docker to specify where gunicorn will log to
• Allow DATABASE_URL to contain custom MySQL ports for docker-entrypoint.sh
• Drop WORKERS count to 1 to avoid dealing with Flask-SocketIO sticky sessions'
• Install gevent-websocket and use it by default until we have a better solution
• NOTE: In future releases, websockets functionality will likely be removed. (#852)

2.0.3 / 2019-01-12

Security Release

This release resolves a security issue that allowed malicious users to hijack admin browser sessions in certain browsers under certain configurations.

The implemented fix is to require the new CSRF-Token header on state-changing requests with a Content-Type of application/json.
The same nonce used for standard POST requests is re-used for the CSRF-Token header.

Because of the necessary changes to the API, the previously used call to fetch() in themes should now be replaced with CTFd.fetch().

If you have questions or need help upgrading, please reach out in the CTFd Slack

Security

• Require CSRF-Token header on all API requests.
• Require CSRF protection on all HTTP methods except GET, HEAD, OPTIONS, and TRACE.
• Default session cookie to SameSite=Lax
• Send initial user information request to MajorLeagueCyber over HTTPS

General

• Fix update_check() logic so that we don't accidentally remove the update notification.

Themes

• Remove explicit usage of script_root in public JS.
  • In custom themes, use the CTFd.fetch() function (defined in CTFd.js) and properly register the url root and CSRF nonce in base.html as shown below:

  var script_root = "{{ request.script_root }}";
  var csrf_nonce = "{{ nonce }}";
  CTFd.options.urlRoot = script_root;
  CTFd.options.csrfNonce = csrf_nonce;
  

• Reduce required amount of parameters required for static theme files.
  • i.e. url_for('views.themes') no longer requires the themes parameter. It now defaults to the currently in-use theme.

2.0.2 / 2019-01-03

General

• Fix regression where public challenges could not be attempted by unauthed users.
• Admin Config Panel UI no longer allows changing of user mode.
• Show notification titles and allow for deleting notifications
  • Update notification UI in admin panel to be similar to the public-facing UI
• Fix subdirectory deployments in a generic manner by modifying request.path to combine both request.script_root and request.path.
  • Also create a request preprocessor to redirect users into the true CTFd app when deploying on a subdirectory.
  • Redirect to request.full_path instead of just request.path.
• Fix TestingConfig.SAFE_MODE not being reset between tests.
• Disable value input in dynamic challenge update field since we calculate it on the user's behalf.
• Fix displaying incorrect account link in the solves tab of a challenge modal.
• Pin normality version because of an upstream issue in dataset.
• Fix 500's when users submit non-integer values to ?page=1

API

• Add /api/v1/notifications/<id> to allow accessing notifactions by ID.
  • This is currently public but will become permission based later in the future
• Add account_url field to the response of /api/v1/<challenge_id>/solves so the client knows where an account is located.

Plugins

• Add new plugin utilities to register javascript and css files for the admin panel.
  • Also fixed issue where those scripts and files were shared between generated applications

2.0.1 / 2018-12-09

2.0.1 is a patch release to fix regressions and bugs in 2.0.0.

If you are upgrading from a version prior to 2.0.0 please read the 2.0.0 change notes for instructions on updating to 2.0.0 before updating to 2.0.1.

General

• Fix setting auth for get_smtp().
  • Add MAIL_USEAUTH to config.py.
• Add more mail documentation to config.py.
• Disable jinja cache properly by setting cache_size to 0 (#662)
  Regression from 1.2.0.
• Fix downloading files as an anonymous user.
• Fix viewing challenges anonymously if they have empty requirements. Closes #789
  • Allow anonymous users to see see challenges with empty requirements or anonymized challenges
• Clean up admin mail settings to use new label/small structure
• Fix email confirmations and improve test.
• Fix password resets from double hashing passwords

Themes

• Change confirm.html to use the variable user instead of team

API

• Grant admin write access to verified field in UserSchema.
• Fix setting mail_username, mail_password
• Prevent overriding smtp attributes on config update
• Fix hint loading for admins by adding /api/v1/hints/<id>?preview=true for use by admins
• Fixing a bug where prerequisites could not be set for dynamic challenges due to a division by zero error where defaults were being set unnecessarily.

Exports

• Fix syncing down an empty S3 bucket
• Fix S3Uploader in Python 3 and fix test
• Fix S3 sync function to only pull down files instead of trying to pull directories

2.0.0 / 2018-12-2

2.0.0 is a significant, backwards-incompaitble release.

Many unofficial plugins will not be supported in CTFd 2.0.0. If you're having trouble updating your plugins
please join the CTFd Slack for help and discussion.

If you are upgrading from a prior version be sure to make backups and have a reversion plan before upgrading.

• If upgrading from 1.2.0 please make use of the migrations/1_2_0_upgrade_2_0_0.py script as follows:
  1. Make all necessary backups. Backup the database, uploads folder, and source code directory.
  2. Upgrade the source code directory (i.e. git pull) but do not run any updated code yet.
  3. Set the DATABASE_URL in CTFd/config.py to point to your existing CTFd database.
  4. Run the upgrade script from the CTFd root folder i.e. python migrations/1_2_0_upgrade_2_0_0.py.
     • This migration script will attempt to migrate data inside the database to 2.0.0 but it cannot account for every situation.
     • Examples of situations where you may need to manually migrate data:
       • Tables/columns created by plugins
       • Tables/columns created by forks
       • Using databases which are not officially supported (e.g. sqlite, postgres)
  5. Setup the rest of CTFd (i.e. config.py), migrate/update any plugins, and run normally.
• If upgrading from a version before 1.2.0, please upgrade to 1.2.0 and then continue with the steps above.

General

• Seperation of Teams into Users and Teams.
  • Use User Mode if you want users to register as themselves and play on their own.
  • Use Team Mode if you want users to create and join teams to play together.
• Integration with MajorLeagueCyber (MLC). (https://majorleaguecyber.org)
  • Organizers can register their event with MLC and will receive OAuth Client ID & Client Secret.
  • Organizers can set those OAuth credentials in CTFd to allow users and teams to automatically register in a CTF.
• Data is now provided to the front-end via the REST API. (#551)
  • Javascript uses fetch() to consume the REST API.
• Dynamic Challenges are built in.
• S3 backed uploading/downloading built in. (#661)
• Real time notifications/announcements. (#600)
  • Uses long-polling instead of websockets to simplify deployment.
• Email address domain whitelisting. (#603)
• Database exporting to CSV. (#656)
• Imports/Exports rewritten to act as backups.
  • Importing no longer stacks values.
  • Exports are no longer partial.
• Reset CTF from config panel (Remove all users, solves, fails. i.e. only keep Challenge data.) (#639)
• Countries are pre-determined and selectable instead of being user-entered.
  • Countries stored based on country code.
  • Based on https://github.com/umpirsky/country-list/blob/master/data/en_US/country.csv.
• Sessions are no longer stored using secure cookies. (#658)
  • Sessions are now stored server side in a cache (filesystem or redis) allowing for session revocation.
  • In order to delete the cache during local development you can delete CTfd/.data/filesystem_cache.
• Challenges can now have requirements which must be met before the challenge can be seen/solved.
• Workshop mode, score hiding, registration hiding, challenge hiding have been changed to visibility settings.
• Users and Teams can now be banned preventing access to the CTF.
• Dockerfile improvements.
  • WORKERS count in docker-entrypoint.sh defaults to 1. (#716)
  • docker-entrypoint.sh exits on any error. (#717)
• Increased test coverage.
• Create SAFE_MODE configuration to disable loading of plugins.
• Migrations have been reset.

Themes

• Data is now provided to the front-end via the REST API.
  • Javascript uses fetch() to consume the REST API.
• The admin theme is no longer considered seperated from the core theme and should always be together.
• Themes now use url_for() to generate URLs instead of hardcoding.
• socket.io (via long-polling) is used to connect to CTFd to receive notifications.
• ctf_name() renamed to get_ctf_name() in themes.
• ctf_logo() renamed to get_ctf_logo() in themes.
• ctf_theme() renamed to get_ctf_theme() in themes.
• Update Font-Awesome to 5.4.1.
• Update moment.js to 2.22.2. (#704)
• Workshop mode, score hiding, registration hiding, challenge hiding have been changed to visibility functions.
  • accounts_visible(), challenges_visible(), registration_visible(), scores_visible()

Plugins

• Plugins are loaded in sorted() order
• Rename challenge type plugins to use .html and have simplified names. (create, update, view)
• Many functions have moved around because utils.py has been broken up and refactored. (#475)
• Marshmallow (https://marshmallow.readthedocs.io) is now used by the REST API to validate and serialize/deserialize API data.
  • Marshmallow schemas and views are used to restrict SQLAlchemy columns to user roles.
• The REST API features swagger support but this requires more utilization internally.
• Errors can now be provided between routes and decoraters through message flashing. (CTFd.utils.helpers; get_errors, get_infos, info_for, error_for)
• Email registration regex relaxed. (#693)
• Many functions have moved and now have dedicated utils packages for their category.
• Create SAFE_MODE configuration to disable loading of plugins.

1.2.0 / 2018-05-04

General

• Updated to Flask 1.0 & switched documentation to suggest using flask run instead of python serve.py.
• Added the ability to make static & regex flags case insensitive.
• The /chals endpoint no longer lists the details of challenges.
  • The /chals/:id endpoint is now used to load challenge information before display.
• Admins can now see what users have solved a given challenge from the admin panel.
• Fixed issue with imports extracting files outside of the CTFd directory.
• Added import zipfile validation and optional size restriction.
• The ctftime, authentication, and admin restrictions have been converted to decorators to improve code reuse.
  • 403 is now a more common status code. Previously it only indicated CSRF failure, now it can indicate login failure
    or other Forbidden access situations.
• Challenge previews now work consistently instead of occasionally failing to show.
• Tests are now randomly ordered with nose-randomly.

Themes

• Admins now have the ability to upload a CTF logo from the config panel.
• Switched from the marked library to Markdown-It for client side markdown rendering.
  • This will break Challenge type plugins that override the markdown renderer since we are no longer using the marked renderers.
• Introduced the ezpg() JS function to make it easier to draw a progressbar modal.
• Introduced the $.patch() AJAX wrapper.
• Team names are truncated properly to 50 characters in teams.html.
• The admin panel now uses Bootstrap badges instead of buttons to indicate properties such as admin, verified, visible.

Plugins

• Challenge type plugins now use a global challenge object with exposed functions to specify how to display a challenge.
  (preRender(), render(), postRender(), submit()).
  • Challenge type plugins also have access to window.challenge.data which allow for the previously mentioned functions to
    process challenge data and change logic accordingly.
• Challenge type plugins now get full control over how a challenge is displayed via the nunjucks files.
• Challenge plugins should now pass the entire flag/key object to a Custom flag type.
  • This allows the flag type to make use of the data column to decide how to operate on the flag. This is used to implement
    case insensitive flags.
• Challenge modals (modal.njk) now use {{ description }} instead of {{ desc }} properly aligning with the database schema.
• The update and create modals now inject data into the modal via nunjucks instead of client side Javascript.
• The utils.base64decode() & utils.base64encode() functions no longer expose url encoding/decoding parameters.

1.1.4 / 2018-04-05

General

• [SECURITY] Fixed XSS in team website. (#604)
• Fixed deleting challenges that have a hint associated. (#601)

Themes

• Removed "SVG with JavaScript" in favor of "Web Fonts with CSS". (#604)

1.1.3 / 2018-03-26

General

• [SECURITY] Fixed XSS in team name field on team deletion. (#592)
• Fixed an issue where MariaDB defaults in Docker Compose caused difficult to debug 500 errors. (#566)
• Improved Docker usage:
  • Redis cache
  • Configurable amount of workers
  • Easier to access logs
  • Plugin requirements are installed on image build.
  • Switched from the default gunicorn synchronous worker to gevent
• Fixed an issue where ties would be broken incorrectly if there are challenges that are worth 0 points. (#577)
• Fixed update checks not happening on CTFd start. (#595)
• Removed the static_html handler to access raw HTML files. (#561)
  • Pages is now the only supported means of accessing/creating a page.
• Removed uwsgi specific configuration files.
• Fixed issue with Docker image having a hard coded database host name. (#587)

Themes

• Fixed scrollbar showing on pages that are smaller than the screen size (#589)
• Fixed displaying the team rank while in workshop mode. (#590)
• Fixed flag modal not clearing when creating multiple new flags. (#594)

Plugins

• Add a utility decorator to allow routes to forego CSRF protection. (#596)

General

• Fixed page links on subdirectory deployments
• Fixed challenge updating on subdirectory deployments
• Fixed broken icon buttons on Safari

Themes

• Upgraded to Bootstrap 4.0.0
• Upgraded to jQuery 3.3.1
• Upgraded to FontAwesome 5.0.4

General

• Fixed regression where users could not be promoted to admins or verified.
• Fixed two icons in the Media Library which were not updated to Font Awesome 5.
• Challenge previews now include tags, hints, and files.
• Fixed an issue where a page could not be published immediately after being saved.

Themes

• Upgraded to Bootstrap 4 Beta v3. No major changes needed by themes.
• Fixed issue where the frozen message was not centered in the team page.
• The JavaScript update() function now has a callback instead of being hardcoded.
• chalboard.js now passes script_root into the Nunjucks templates so that file downloads work properly under subdirectories.

Themes

• The original theme has been replaced by the core theme. The core theme is written in Bootstrap v4.0.0-beta.2 and significantly reduces the amount of custom styles/classes used.
• Challenges can now be previewed from the admin panel.
• The modals to modify files, flags, tags, and hints are no longer controlled by Challenge Type Plugins and are defined in CTFd itself.
• The admin graphs and admin statistics pages have been combined.
• Percentage solved for challenges has been moved to the new statistics page.
• The scoregraph on the scoreboard has been cleaned up to better fit the page width.
• Score graphs now use user-specific colors.
• Hints can now be previewed from the admin panel.
• Various confirmation modals have been replaced with ezq.js, a simple Bootstrap modal wrapper.
• Fixed a bug where challenge buttons on the challenge board would load before being styled as solved.
• FontAwesome has been upgraded to FontAwesome 5.
• Themes are now rendered using the Jinja2 SandboxedEnvironment.

Database

• Keys.key_type has been renamed to Keys.type.
• Pages Improvements:
  • Page previews are now independent of the editor page.
  • Pages now have a title which refer to the link's name on the navbar.
  • Pages can now be drafts which cannot be seen by regular users.
  • Pages can now require authentication to view.
  • CSS editing has been moved to the config panel.

Challenge Type Plugins

• Handlebars has been replaced with Nunjucks which means Challenge Type Plugins using Handlebars must be updated to work with 1.1.0

General

• CTFs can now be paused to prevent solves.
• A new authed_only decorator is available to restrict pages to logged-in users.
• CTFd will now check for updates against versioning.ctfd.io. Admins will see in the admin panel that CTFd can be updated.
• A ratelimit function has been implemented. Authentication and email related functions are now ratelimited.
• Code coverage from codecov.
• Admins can now see the reason why an email to a team failed to send.
• SMTP email connections take priority over mailgun settings now. The opposite used to be true.
• The JavaScript submitkey() function now takes an optional callback.
• utils.get_config() no longer looks at app.config values. Instead use utils.get_app_config().
• Only prompt about upgrades when running with a TTY.

• Challenge Type Plugins now have a static interface which should be implemented by all challenge types.
  • Challenge Type Plugins are now self-contained in the plugin system meaning you no longer need to manipulate themes in order to register Challenge Type Plugins.
  • Challenge Type plugins should implement the create, read, update, delete, attempt, solve, and fail static methods.
  • Challenge Type plugins now use strings for both their IDs and names.
  • Challenge Type plugins now contain references to their related modal template files.
• Plugins can now register directories and files to be served by CTFd
  • CTFd.plugins.register_plugin_assets_directory registers a directory to be served
  • CTFd.plugins.register_plugin_asset registers a file to be served
• Plugins can now add to the admin and user menu/nav bars
  • Plugins can now add to the admin menu bar with CTFd.plugins. register_admin_plugin_menu_bar
  • Plugins can now add to the user menu bar with CTFd.plugins. register_user_page_menu_bar
• Plugins should now use config.json to define plugin attributes in lieu of config.html. Backwards compatibility has been maintained. With config.json, plugins can now control where the user is linked to instead of being directed to config.html.
• The challenge type and key type columns are now strings.
• Some utils functions now have CTFd.plugins wrappers.
• There is now a /team endpoint which takes the user to their own public profile.
• Mail server username and passwords are no longer rendered in the Admin Config panel.
• Users can now see their own user graphs when scores are hidden.
• prepare.sh is now marked executable.
• Spinners are now properly removed if there is no data to display.

Always backup your database before upgrading!

• Add spinners to the original theme for loading graphs
• Plugins can register global JS files with utils.register_plugin_script()
• Plugins can register global CSS files with utils.register_plugin_stylesheet()
• Challenge type plugins can now control the response to a user's input
• Vagrantfile!
• Containers functionality has been moved into a plugin
• Hide solves from the JSON endpoint when hiding scores.
• Pages are now cached so that we don't hit the database every time we need to load a page.
• The /top/10 endpoint has been changed to group users by ID instead of by name.
• Admins are allowed to see and solve challenges before a CTF starts.
• The CTF time configuration UI has been fixed to allow for the removal of times.
• The score graph in the original theme is now sorted by score.
• Bug fixes
  • Use strings to store IP addresses.
  • Take into account awards when we calculate a user's place.
  • Plugin configuration clears the cache.
  • More logging inside of auth.py.
  • Username and password in the SMTP mail configuration are now optional.
  • Markdown in challenges has been fixed to it's pre-regression state and is easier to write.
  • Improvements to Python 3 compatability.
  • Variety of new tests to further test behavior.
  • Fixed an old bug where users would incorrectly see a challenge with 0 solves.

• Increased Unicode support. Smileys everywhere 👌
  • MySQL charset defaults to utf8mb4
• Pages feature now supports Markdown and the Pages editor has a preview button
• IPv6 support for users' IP addresses
• Theme switching no longer requires a server restart
• Admins can now search for teams in the admin panel
• The config.html page for plugins are now Jinja templates giving them much more functionality
• Hints are automatically unlocked once the CTF is finished
• Themes now have a dedicated themes folder
• Graphs are now transparent so that themes can style the background
• Tags are now inserted into the classes of challenge buttons on the default theme
• There is now an override_template() function allowing plugins to replace the content of any template loaded by CTFd
• Changes to the email confirmation flow and making confirmation email resending user controlled.

• Challenges can now have max attempts set on a per challenge level
• Setup now automatically logs you in as an admin. Don't leave your CTFs unconfigured!
• Tests are now executed by TravisCI! Help out by adding tests for functionality!
• CTFd now has it's own Github organization!
• From a plugin you can replace most of the utils functions used by CTFd. This allows plugins to replace even more functionality within CTFd
• CTFd now has a concept of Hints!
• You can now customize the challenge editting modals in the admin panel
• There are now links to social media pages where you can follow CTFd to track updates.
• CTFd now has the ability to export and import data. This lets you save your CTFs as zip files and redeploy them again and again.

• Challenge types
  • This means CTFd now supports multiple kinds of challenges.
  • Challenges are now modifiable with a plugin.
• Solve types
  • This means CTFd now supports multiple kinds of flags/keys.
  • The flag/key logic is now modifiable with a plugin.
• Plugins are now allowed a configuration page
• The formerly massive admin.py is separated out into easier to work on chunks
• Improved Dockerfile and associated docker-compose file
• Fixes Python 3 compatibility
• Fixes a variety of glitches reported by users

Always backup database before upgrading!

• 1.0.0 release! Things work!
• Manage everything about your CTF from a browser
• Run containers directly from CTFd
• Themes for customizing the look and feel of CTFd
• Plugins for customizing CTFd's functionality
• Database migrations for future modifications and an eventual automatic update solution