CHANGELOG.md

3.6.0 / 2023-08-21

General

• Translations support for Spanish, Polish, German, Chinese
  • If you wish to fix or maintain a language translation please join at CTFd's public POEditor page.
• Add a total user registration limit option
• Dynamic value challenges can now choose between linear and logarithmic decay functions
• Free hints are now visible by unauthenticated users if challenges are visible by unauthenticated users
• Fix issue where a custom field named affiliation or website prevented registration
  • No longer special case "Affiliation" or "Website" as custom field titles. Previously custom fields with those titles would set the user's affiliation or website but this behavior has been removed.

Admin Panel

• Challenge Preview has been improved to support arbitrary custom themes
• Long flags in the Admin Panel are now truncated but can be expanded and copied
• Add UI to mark incorrect submissions as correct
  • Add the discard type for submissions
  • Add PATCH /api/v1/submissions/[submission_id] to mark submissions as correct
• Add section in the Config Panel to configure HTML_SANITIZATION
  • Setting HTML_SANITIZATION to true in config.ini cannot be disabled via the Admin Panel
• Add wildcard for email whitelisting

Deployment

• Add new envvar SKIP_DB_PING to instruct the CTFd Docker image to not test if the database server is available
• Add new config AWS_S3_ADDRESSING_STYLE
  • Support selecting the S3 addressing style. It defaults to "auto" as when it's not set, but can also be set to virtual or path
• Add new config AWS_S3_CUSTOM_DOMAIN which specifies a domain that replaces the default one in presigned download URLs
  • Required for certain S3 implementations
• Flask and Werkzeug have been upgraded to v2.0.3. Other dependencies have been updated for compatability.
• SQLAlchemy has been updated to v1.4.
• PyMySQL has been upgraded to v1.0.2.
• The flask cli tool is now offered as an alternative to the manage.py script.
• gzip compression is now enabled in the provided nginx configuration

API

• API tokens now have a description field
• API tokens now start with a ctfd_ prefix to make them easier to identify
• GET /api/v1/hints/[hint_id] will now return hint information for free hints for unauthenticated users if challenges are visible

Themes

• core-beta is now provided in all CTFd instances
• core-beta is the default theme during setup

3.5.3 / 2023-06-08

Deployment

• Fixed permissions error in Dockerfile
• Bump dependencies for pybluemonday

3.5.2 / 2023-05-01

General

• Generate cachable S3 URLs by rounding time down to the previous hour to generate a consistent URL
• Change email whitelist error message to not include the list of allowed domains
• Clean up the language for confirming the password on team password change
• Fix issue where dynamic challenges break if the decay is 0 and prevent users from adding a decay limit of 0 to dynamic value challenges

Admin Panel

• Adds support for admins to control robots.txt
• Clean up the aesthetics for the 'Pause CTF' and 'View After CTF' configs
• Replaced TLS and SSL checkbox text to match the defaults used by Mozilla Thunderbird to eliminate confusion when configuring SMTP

Deployment

• Slim down Docker image by removing several dependencies not needed for production usage
  • The image size has been reduced from 648MB to 398MB
• In the Docker image run CTFd in a virtual environment located at /opt/venv
• Add freezegun to application dependencies
• Bump dependencies for pybluemonday, redis, SQLAlchemy-Utils, python-geoacumen-city
• Fix race conditions on cache healthcheck
• Fix situations where numeric config items in config.ini could cause CTFd to not start

3.5.1 / 2023-01-23

General

• The public scoreboard page is no longer shown to users if account visibility is disabled
• Teams created by admins using the normal team creation flow are now hidden by default
• Redirect users to the team creation page if they access a certain pages before the CTF starts
• Added a notice on the Challenges page to remind Admins if they are in Admins Only mode
• Fixed an issue where users couldn't login to their team even though they were already on the team
• Fixed an issue with scoreboard tie breaking when an award results in a tie
• Fixed the order of solves, fails, and awards to always be in chronological ordering (latest first).
• Fixed an issue where certain custom fields could not be submitted

Admin Panel

• Improved the rendering of Admin Panel tables on mobile devices
• Clarified the behavior of Score Visibility with respect to Account Visibility in the Admin Panel help text
• Added user id and user email fields to the user mode scoreboard CSV export
• Add CSV export for teams+members+fields which is teams with Custom Field entries and their team members with Custom Field entries
• The import process will now catch all exceptions in the import process to report them in the Admin Panel
• Fixed issue where field_entries could not be imported under MariaDB
• Fixed issue where config entries sometimes would be recreated for some reason causing an import to fail
• Fixed issue with Firefox caching checkboxes by adding autocomplete='off' to Admin Panel pages
• Fixed issue where Next selection for a challenge wouldn't always load in Admin Panel

API

• Improve response time of /api/v1/challenges and /api/v1/challenges/[challenge_id]/solves by caching the solve count data for users and challenges
• Add HEAD /api/v1/notifications to get a count of notifications that have happened.
  • This also includes a since_id parameter to allow for a notification cursor.
  • Unread notification count can now be tracked by themes that track which notifications a user has read
• Add since_id to GET /api/v1/notifications to get Notifications that have happened since a specific ID

Deployment

• Imports have been disabled when running with a SQLite database backend
  • See CTFd#2131
• Added /healthcheck endpoint to check if CTFd is ready
• There are now ARM Docker images for OSS CTFd
• Bump dependencies for passlib, bcrypt, requests, gunicorn, gevent, python-geoacumen-city, cmarkgfm
• Properly load SAFE_MODE config from environment variable
• The AWS_S3_REGION config has been added to allow specifying an S3 region. The default is us-east-1
• Add individual DATABASE config keys as an alternative to DATABASE_URL
  • DATABASE_PROTOCOL: SQLAlchemy DB protocol (+ driver, optionally)
  • DATABASE_USER: Username to access DB server with
  • DATABASE_PASSWORD: Password to access DB server with
  • DATABASE_HOST: Hostname of the DB server to access
  • DATABASE_PORT: Port of the DB server to access
  • DATABASE_NAME: Name of the database to use
• Add individual REDIS config keys as an alternative to REDIS_URL
  • REDIS_PROTOCOL: Protocol to access Redis server with (either redis or rediss)
  • REDIS_USER: Username to access Redis server with
  • REDIS_PASSWORD: Password to access Redis server with
  • REDIS_HOST: Hostname of the Redis server to access
  • REDIS_PORT: Port of the Redis server to access
  • REDIS_DB: Numeric ID of the database to access

Plugins

• Adds support for config.json to have multiple paths to add to the Plugins dropdown in the Admin Panel
• Plugins and their migrations now have access to the get_all_tables and get_columns_for_table functions
• Email sending functions have now been seperated into classes that can be customized via plugins.
  • Add CTFd.utils.email.providers.EmailProvider
  • Add CTFd.utils.email.providers.mailgun.MailgunEmailProvider
  • Add CTFd.utils.email.providers.smtp.SMTPEmailProvider
  • Deprecate CTFd.utils.email.mailgun.sendmail
  • Deprecate CTFd.utils.email.smtp.sendmail

Themes

• The beta interface Assets.manifest_css has been removed
• event-source-polyfill is now pinned to 1.0.19.
  • See CTFd#2159
  • Note that we will not be using this polyfill starting with the core-beta theme.
• Add autofocus to text fields on authentication pages

3.5.0 / 2022-05-09

General

• Add a next challenge recommendation to challenges
• Add support for only viewing hints after unlocking another hint
• Add size checking and recommendation for images uploaded during setup

Admin Panel

• Imports now happen in the background so that admins can watch the status of the import
  • Add progress tracking to backup/export importing
  • Add GET /admin/import to see status of import
  • The public user facing portion of CTFd is now disabled during imports
• Fix issue where custom field entries for Users and Teams would be misaligned in the scoreboard CSV export
• Show admins the email server error message when email sending fails
• Fix issue where the current theme cannot be found in list of themes
• Fix page preview so that it accounts for the provided format
• Add links from User/Team Profile IP addresses to a User IP address search page
• Add city geolocation to Team Profile IP addresses

API

• Add the count meta field to the following endpoints:
  • /api/v1/users/me/solves
  • /api/v1/users/me/fails
  • /api/v1/users/me/awards
  • /api/v1/teams/me/awards
  • /api/v1/users/[user_id]/solves
  • /api/v1/users/[user_id]/fails
  • /api/v1/users/[user_id]/awards
  • /api/v1/teams/[team_id]/solves
  • /api/v1/teams/[team_id]/awards
• Improve speed of /api/v1/teams/me/fails
• Improve speed of /api/v1/teams/[team_id]/fails
• Improve speed of /api/v1/users/me/fails
• Improve speed of /api/v1/users/[user_id]/fails

Deployment

• Use Python 3.9 as the default Python version
• Prevent any possible usage of an already existing session ID by checking for duplicates during during session ID generation
• No longer install python3-dev in Dockerfile
• docker-compose.yml now uses nginx:stable as the image for nginx

Plugins

• CTFd._internal.challenge.render and CTFd._internal.challenge.renderer in the view.js Challenge type file has been deprecated. Instead Challenge plugins should refer to the challenge.html attribute provided by the API. Essentially CTFd is moving to having markdown & HTML rendered by the server instead of rendering on the client.

Themes

• Create the core-beta theme and begin documenting the creation of themes using Vite
• Add userName and userEmail to the CTFd init object in base.html for easier integration with other JavaScript code
• Add teamId and teamName to the CTFd init object in base.html for easier integration with other JavaScript code
• Adds the Assets constant to access front end assets from Jinja templates
• Adds a views.themes_beta route to avoid the .dev/.min extension being added automatically to frontend asset urls

Miscellaneous

• Fix double logging in log() function
• Add --delete_import_on_finish to python manage.py import_ctf
• Fix issue where field_entries table could not be imported when moving between MySQL and MariaDB

3.4.3 / 2022-03-07

Security

• Bump cmarkgfm to 0.8.0 to resolve CVE-2022-24724. Copied entry from 3.4.2 since 3.4.2 introduced a bug that prevented writing raw HTML.

General

• Fix issue where raw HTML would not be rendered in markdown

3.4.2 / 2022-03-07

Security

• Bump cmarkgfm to 0.8.0 to resolve CVE-2022-24724

General

• Fix issue where unauthed users couldn't download challenge files after CTF end but viewing after CTF was enabled

3.4.1 / 2022-02-19

General

• Make session cookies persist in the browser after close
• Fix issue where all-numeric registration codes wouldn't work
• Fix issue where a user's session isn't cleared properly after they are deleted by an admin
• Fix issue where CTF end time couldn't be set during setup

API

• Improved speed of the /api/v1/challenges/[challenge_id]/solves endpoint
• Document API authentication and Content-Type header requirement
• Add nested UserSchema and TeamSchema to SubmissionSchema for easier access to account name

Admin Panel

• Improve CSV import error reporting and validation
• Fix non-clickable checkbox label in user creation form in Admin Panel
• Allow submissions per minute ratelimit to be configurable in Admin Panel
• Add a link in the Pages Editor to the Page Variables documentation page

Themes

• Fix issue where invalid theme_settings can cause broken frontend
• Replace node-sass with sass and upgrade sass-loader

Deployment

• Serve all assets from CTFd regardless of internet availability (i.e. fonts and font-awesome)
• Fix regression in REVERSE_PROXY to allow comma seperated integers
• Bump flask-restx to 0.5.1
• Bump pybluemonday to 0.0.9
• Added support for S3 signature version 4 authentication to support alternative S3 buckets (Google Cloud Storage, DigitalOcean Spaces, etc)

Miscellaneous

• Add a Github Actions job to publish Docker images to Dockerhub and ghcr

3.4.0 / 2021-08-11

General

• Added the ability to have Challenge Topics
  • Challenge Topics are small topic strings which are only visible to Admins
  • They should denote what topics a given challenge involves
• Added connection_info to Challenges to allow Admins to more easily specify the connection info for a challenge
• Added ability to import CSVs of users, teams, and challenges
• Added ability to limit the total number of teams
• Pages now have access to variables ctf_name, ctf_description, ctf_start, ctf_end, ctf_freeze. (e.g. {{ ctf_name }})
• IP Addresses in the Admin Panel will now show the city of the IP address as well as the country
• Make User Mode it's own dedicated tab in the setup flow and more clearly explain what each user mode does
• Added the ability to have a registration password
  • Does not currently apply to SSO/auth provider or API based account creation
• Prevent users from participating with challenges if their profile is not complete (i.e. haven't filled out all required custom fields)
• Fixed an issue where admins couldn't see some challenges in the add requirements interface
• Fixed an issue where a challenge couldn't be accessed beacuse it had prerequisites on a deleted challenge
• Fixed an issue where User profiles could not be loaded in the Admin Panel due to missing/invalid Tracking IP addresses
• Fixed an issue where users with authentication provider accoutns would get an error when attempting to login
• Fixed an issue where MajorLeagueCyber config from config.ini was not being respected

API

• Added connection_info field to /api/v1/challenges/[challenge_id]
• Added /api/v1/topics for admins to create/delete topics
• Added /api/v1/challenges/[challenge_id]/topics for admins to list the topics on a challenge
• /api/v1/challenges will now sort by ID as value to better standardize API output with different databases
• /api/v1/configs will now provide an error message when provided Config values are too long
• PATCH /api/v1/teams/[team_id] will now only let team members be team captain
  • No security issues here, it would just be invalid data.

Themes

• CTFd now has the THEME_FALLBACK option enabled by default. This allows users to provide incomplete themes. Missing theme files will be provided from the built-in core theme
• CTFd will now pass the title of a Page over to the template when rendering
• No longer show the token type in user settings
• Added window.BETA_sortChallenges to /challenges so that theme code can more easily define how to sort challenges
  • Note that this functionality is beta because we expect to revamp the entire themes system
• Added window.updateChallengeBoard to /challenges so that theme code can more easily define when to update challenges
  • Note that this functionality is beta because we expect to revamp the entire themes system
• Added window.updateScoreboard to /scoreboard so that theme code can more easily define when to update the scoreboard
  • Note that this functionality is beta because we expect to revamp the entire themes system

Plugins

• Added Challenges.plugin_class to the Challenges model to access the challenge type plugin class from the Model
  • Allows templates to access the plugin class more easily
  • Allows plugins to access the plugin class without having to load the class explicitly

Admin Panel

• Reworked the Challenge Requirements UI
  • Officially support the concept of anonymized challenges if prerequisites aren't met
• Added ability for Pages to be written in direct HTML instead of Markdown
• Pages now have access to variables ctf_name, ctf_description, ctf_start, ctf_end, ctf_freeze
  • ctf_start, ctf_end, ctf_freeze are represented as ISO8601 timestamps
• Make it easier to change the user mode without having to delete all accounts. Instead we will only delete all submissions.
• When in team mode, user pages will now show their team's score instead of their own personal score
• Show a team member's individual score on their team's page
• Made the challenge creation form wider

Deployment

• The THEME_FALLBACK config is now set to true by default
• Replace installation and usage of mysqladmin (specifically mysqladmin ping) with a custom Python script
• Bump version of pybluemonday to 0.0.7 (fixes HTML sanitization bypasses and allows comments in HTML)
• Bump pydantic from 1.5.1 to 1.6.2

Miscellaneous

• Make .dockerignore ignore node_modules in any subdirectory
• Added solves and solved_by_me fields to the Swagger documentation for Challenges
• Dynamic challenges will now take their initial valuation from the inital keyword instead of the previous value keyword.
  • This allows ctfcli to manage dynamic challenges. See CTFd#1875
• Added a timestamp to a CTFd export's filename
• Deleting uploads under the Filesystem upload provider will now delete the parent folder as well as the target file

3.3.1 / 2021-07-15

Security

• Fixes an issue where users could join teams without knowing the team password or having a team invite

3.3.0 / 2021-03-26

General

• Don't require a team for viewing challenges if Challenge visibility is set to public
• Add a THEME_FALLBACK config to help develop themes. See Themes section for details.

API

• Implement a faster /api/v1/scoreboard endpoint in Teams Mode
• Add the solves item to both /api/v1/challenges and /api/v1/challenges/[challenge_id] to more easily determine how many solves a challenge has
• Add the solved_by_me item to both /api/v1/challenges and /api/v1/challenges/[challenge_id] to more easily determine if the current account has solved the challenge
• Prevent admins from deleting themselves through DELETE /api/v1/users/[user_id]
• Add length checking to some sensitive fields in the Pages and Challenges schemas
• Fix issue where PATCH /api/v1/users[user_id] returned a list instead of a dict
• Fix exception that occured on demoting admins through PATCH /api/v1/users[user_id]
• Add team_id to GET /api/v1/users to determine if a user is already in a team
• Provide a more useful error message when using an expired token

Themes

• Add a THEME_FALLBACK config to help develop themes.
  • THEME_FALLBACK will configure CTFd to try to find missing theme files in the default built-in core theme.
  • This makes it easier to develop themes or use incomplete themes.
• Allow for one theme to reference and inherit from another theme through approaches like {% extends "core/page.html" %}
• Allow for the automatic date rendering format to be overridden by specifying a data-time-format attribute.
• Add styling for the <blockquote> element.
• Change users/private.html, users/public.html to show awards before a user gets a solve
• Change teams/private.html, teams/public.html to show awards before a team gets a solve
• Change colorHash function to use HSL color values to avoid generating too light/dark colors
• Fix an issue where hidden users couldn't see their graphing data on their private user page (/user)
• Fix scoreboard table identifier to switch between User/Team depending on configured user mode
• Switch the challenges page in core to use the new API information in /api/v1/challenges to mark solves and display solve counts
• Switch to using Bootstrap's scss in core/main.scss to allow using Bootstrap variables
• Consolidate Jinja error handlers into a single function and better handle issues where error templates can't be found

Plugins

• Set plugin migration version after successful migrations
• Fix issue where Page URLs injected into the navbar were relative instead of absolute

Admin Panel

• Add User standings as well as Teams standings to the admin scoreboard when in Teams Mode
• Add a UI for adding members to a team from the team's admin page
• Add ability for admins to disable public team creation
• Link directly to users who submitted something in the submissions page if the CTF is in Teams Mode
• Fix Challenge Requirements interface in Admin Panel to not allow empty/null requirements to be added
• Fixed an issue where config times (start, end, freeze times) could not be removed
• Fix an exception that occurred when demoting an Admin user
• Adds a temporary hack for re-enabling Javascript snippets in Flag editor templates. (See #1779)

Deployment

• Fix boolean configs from the config.ini optional section
• Install python3-dev instead of python-dev in apt
• Require pybluemonday as pip dependency
• Remove lxml and html5lib from pip dependencies
• Bump Jinja2 to 2.11.3
• Bump pip-tools to 5.4.0

Miscellaneous

• Rewrite the HTML santiziation feature (controlled by HTML_SANITIZATION) to use the pybluemonday library instead of lxml/html5lib
  • Note that this feature is still in beta
• Cache Docker builds more by copying and installing Python dependencies before copying CTFd
• Change the default emails slightly and rework confirmation email page to make some recommendations clearer
• Use examplectf.com as testing/development domain instead of ctfd.io
• Fix issue where user's name and email would not appear in logs properly
• Add more linting by also linting with flake8-comprehensions and flake8-bugbear
• Add .pyc files and __pycache__ to .dockerignore

3.2.1 / 2020-12-09

• Fixed an issue where Users could not unlock Hints

3.2.0 / 2020-12-07

General

• Add Team invites.
  • Team invites are links containing a token that allow a user to join a team without knowing the team password
  • Captains can generate invite tokens for their teams
  • Admins can generate Team invite links as well
• Improved Team handling
  • Prevent team joining while already on a team
  • Return 403 instead of 200 for team join/create errors
  • Allow team captains whose teams haven't done anything to disband their team
• Allow for uploading navbar logo, favicon, and index page banner during initial setup
• Fixed issue in teams mode where a user couldn't unlock a hint despite their team having enough points
  • The fix for this is essentially to allow the user's points to go negative
• Imports have been made more stable
  • This is primarily done by killing MySQL processes that are locking metadta
  • This is a subpar approach but it seems to be the only solution to avoid a metadata lock in MySQL. This approach did not appear to be needed under Postgres or SQLite

API

• Addition of POST /api/v1/teams/me/members to generate invite tokens for teams
• Fixed an issue in POST /api/v1/awards where CTFd would 500 when a user could not be found by the provided user_id
• POST /api/v1/unlocks in teams mode now uses the team's score to determine if a user can purchase a hint
  • Properly check for existing unlocks in teams mode in POST /api/v1/unlocks
• /api/v1/notifications and /api/v1/notifications/[notification_id] now have an html parameter which specifies the rendered content of the notification content

Themes

• Add Team Invite icon and Disband Team icon to teams/private.html
• Add teams/invite.html file to handle team joining with invites
• Added syntax highlighting to challenge descriptions, pages, hints, notifications, comments, and markdown editors
  • This is done with highlight.js which has been added to package.json
• Fix notifications to properly fix/support Markdown and HTML notifications
  • Notifications SQL Model now has an html propery
  • Notifications API schemas now has an html field
• Removed MomentJS (see https://momentjs.com/docs/#/-project-status/) in favor of dayjs
  • dayjs is mostly API compatible with MomentJS. The only major changes were:
    • dayjs always uses browser local time so you don't need to call .local()
    • dayjs segments out some MomentJS functionality into plugins which need to be imported in before using those features
• Fixed issue in challenge.html where the current attempt count would have a typo
• Fixed issue in challenge.html where the max attempts for a challenge would not show if it was set to 1
• Edit donut charts to have easier to read legends and labels
• Make data zoom bars thinner and more transparent
• Add logo, banner, and favicon settings to the setup.html

Plugins

• The auth.register (/register) endpoint now accepts a ?next= parameter to define where to redirect to after registration
• There is now a registered_only decorator to redirect users to auth.register (/register) instead of auth.login (/login)
• Don't run db.create_all() as much during plugin upgrade or during imports
  • By avoiding this we can let alembic and migrations do more of the table creation work but this means that plugins specifically opt into app.db.create_all() and will not implicitly get it through upgrade().
  • This means plugins that run upgrade() without a migrations folder (no idea who would do this really) will need to upgrade their code.
• The plugin upgrade() function now accepts a lower parameter which specifies what lower revision should be used to start from.
  • This is used to support plugin migrations during import so that we can import data directly at the point that the import was taken from
  • lower="current" means to use the current revision and lower=None would mean to use the absolute base revision (e.g. plugin's first installation)
  • By default this doesn't change upgrade() behavior

Admin Panel

• Add Favicon uploading to the Admin Panel
• Move Logo uploading to the Theme tab in the Admin Panel
• The challenge left side bar tabs have been rewritten into VueJS components.
  • This fixes a number of issues with the consistency of what data is deleted/edited in the challenge editor
  • This also prevents having to refresh the page in most challenge editing situations
• Fixed a possible bug where the update available alert wouldn't go away on server restart
• Examples for regex flags are now provided
• Wrong submissions has been renamed to Incorrect Submissions
• Graphs in the Admin Statistics page will now scroll with mouse wheel to improve browsing large datasets
• Fixed an issue where Users/Teams could be created with a null password

Deployment

• A restart policy set to always has been added to nginx in docker-compose
• Rename requirements.txt to requirements.in and generate requirements.txt using pip-tools under Python 3.6
• UPLOAD_PROVIDER no longer has a default filesystem set in config.ini. Instead it is defaulted through config.py

Miscellaneous

• The psycopg2 dependency in development.txt has been removed in favor of psycopg2-binary which was updated to 2.8.6
• The moto dependency in development.txt has been updated to 1.3.16
• Add pip-tools to development.txt
• Add import_ctf and export_ctf commands to manage.py and deprecate import.py and export.py
• Override the MAIL_SERVER config with the TESTING_MAIL_SERVER envvar during tests
• ping events in the notification event handler have been fixed to not send duplicates

3.1.1 / 2020-09-22

General

• Fix notification deliverability when there are multiple tabs open
• Only play notification sounds in the master tab that receives the notification

Admin Panel

• Fix issue preventing admins from emailing users through the Admin Panel
• Improve Notification UI
  • Clears notification form after notification submission
  • Add notification to notification list after creation

Themes

• Add fix for trying to increment solves when solves are hidden
• Update JS dependencies to fix a transpiliation error preventing optional custom fields from being left empty
  • @babel/core, @babel/preset-env, @fortawesome/fontawesome-free, babel-loader, and @babel/polyfill were updated but only @babel/core needs to be updated to resolve the transpiliation issue
• Remove console.log statements from minified production JS
• Compress notification sound and document the compression command

Miscellaneous

• Add the ability to override the sender header of email sent via SMTP with the MAILSENDER_ADDR config value

3.1.0 / 2020-09-08

General

• Loosen team password confirmation in team settings to also accept the team captain's password to make it easier to change the team password
• Adds the ability to add custom user and team fields for registration/profile settings.
• Improve Notifications pubsub events system to use a subscriber per server instead of a subscriber per browser. This should improve the reliability of CTFd at higher load and make it easier to deploy the Notifications system

Admin Panel

• Add a comments functionality for admins to discuss challenges, users, teams, pages
• Adds a legal section in Configs where users can add a terms of service and privacy policy
• Add a Custom Fields section in Configs where admins can add/edit custom user/team fields
• Move user graphs into a modal for Admin Panel

API

• Add /api/v1/comments to manipulate and create comments

Themes

• Make scoreboard caching only cache the score table instead of the entire page. This is done by caching the specific template section. Refer to #1586, specifically the changes in scoreboard.html.
• Add custom field inputs to profile pages (teams/public.html, teams/private.html, users/public.html, users/private.html), registration pages (register.html), and settings pages (settings.html).
  • This is implemented in the core theme with form.extra & user.fields with a special helper (render_extra_fields) defined in macros/forms.html. The best way to implement this is to look at how the core theme handles it and copy the relevant behavior.
• Add rel=noopener to external links to prevent tab napping attacks
• Change the registration page to reference links to Terms of Service and Privacy Policy if specified in configuration

Miscellaneous

• Make team settings modal larger in the core theme
• Update tests in Github Actions to properly test under MySQL and Postgres
• Make gevent default in serve.py and add a --disable-gevent switch in serve.py
• Add tenacity library for retrying logic
• Add pytest-sugar for slightly prettier pytest output
• Add a listen() method to CTFd.utils.events.EventManager and CTFd.utils.events.RedisEventManager.
  • This method should implement subscription for a CTFd worker to whatever underlying notification system there is. This should be implemented with gevent or a background thread.
  • The subscribe() method (which used to implement the functionality of the new listen() function) now only handles passing notifications from CTFd to the browser. This should also be implemented with gevent or a background thread.

3.0.2 / 2020-08-23

Admin Panel

• Fix submission searching in Admin Panel
• Fix update banner being hidden behind navbar

Plugins

• Change default input & submit blocks in challenge.html to use the default values specified in the original challenge type plugins

3.0.1 / 2020-08-12

General

• Fix issue where admins could not see user graphs/api data if score visibility was set to hidden

Admin Panel

• Allow the Admin Panel Submissions page to filter by Account IDs, Challenge IDs, and Challenge Names
• Link to correct submissions for challenge from the challenge page

API

• Fix regression for creating hints via ctfcli. See #1582 for details. CTFd#1582.
• Deprecate CTFd.api.v1.helpers.models.build_model_filters and wrap it to CTFd.utils.helpers.models.build_model_filters

Themes

• Fix team pages to use the correct core errors component

Plugins

• Fix issues with previewing challenges under some challenge type plugins

Deployment

• Values specified in config.ini will now supercede values specified via environment variable. Config behavior is as follows:
  1. Config Key exists in config.ini and is set to a value. That value becomes the app config.
  2. Config Key exists in config.ini but is set to an empty string. An envvar with the same name is looked up. The envvar's value is used as the app config.
  3. If the envvar is not found, fall back to the default specified value in config.py
  4. If there is no default, use None or an empty string

3.0.0 / 2020-07-27

Changelog Summary

The CTFd v3 Changelog represents the changes from v2.5.0 to v3. It is a summarized version of the changes that occured in all CTFd v3 beta/alpha releases.

CTFd v3 contains some breaking changes but many plugins remain compatible. Themes will need some minor changes to be compatible with v3.

These changes are made with great consideration to existing installations and for the health of the overall CTFd project. If you rely on specific behavior, you can always download the last CTFd v2 release on Github. Official plugin/theme updates will be sent to the email addresses on file.

The major changes in CTFd v3 are as follows with the detailed changelog beneath:

• Server Side HTML/Markdown Rendering

HTML rendering in some cases (challenge description rendering, hint content rendering) has been moved to the server side. Previously it was rendered by the browser but this led to a lot of duplicated behavior and complexity in some plugins. Rendering that HTML content on the server allows CTFd to take more advantage of theme content and reduce duplicated code across themes.

In addition, HTML sanitization can be enabled on the CTFd installation to prevent the injection of malicious scripts in HTML content.

• CommonMark

CTFd now uses CommonMark for HTML/Markdown rendering. This leads to much more consistent rendering of HTML/Markdown content.

In some cases, this can break your HTML output. You can use our development testing script to check if your HTML output will change and correct it accordingly.

• Forms, Nonces, Sessions

CTFd no longer directly injects values into the global session object for a theme. You may have used this as {{ nonce }} or {{ id }}. Instead these values should be accessed via the Session global as so: {{ Session.nonce }}.

All of the public facing forms in CTFd have been converted to form globals with WTForms. You can access them via the Form global in Jinja. For example, {{ Forms.auth.LoginForm() }}. A {{ form.nonce() }} function is available on all forms for easier access to the CSRF nonce as well.

Old forms will still work if the nonce used in the form is updated to {{ Session.nonce }}.

Values provided by configuration and plugins can now be accessed via the Configs and Plugins globals. For example {{ Configs.ctf_name }} and {{ Plugins.scripts }}. See the base.html file of the core theme to get an idea of how to use these values.

• Challenge Type Plugin Enhancements

Challenge type plugins now have better re-useability with the rest of CTFd. Plugin code no longer needs to copy unchanged methods over from the base challenge plugin classes.

In addition, challenge HTML is now rendered on the server side using a new challenge.html file provided by the current theme. This means that the theme effectively controls how a challenge should look overall, but the challenge plugin controls the overall content.

• Python 3

CTFd v3 is Python 3 only.

• Docker image based on Debian

The Docker image used in CTFd is now based on Debian.

• config.ini

Instead of editting config.py directly, it's now a better idea to edit config.ini or provide your configuration via environment variables

Detailed Changelog

General

• CTFd is now Python 3 only
• Render markdown with the CommonMark spec provided by cmarkgfm
• HTML/Markdown content is now rendered on the server side in most cases.
  • This includes challenge descriptions, hint content, and page content
• Ability to render markdown stripped of any malicious JavaScript or HTML.
  • Controlled via the HTML_SANITIZATION server side configuration value
• Inject Config, User, Team, Session, and Plugin globals into Jinja
• User sessions no longer store any user-specific attributes.
  • Sessions only store the user's ID, CSRF nonce, and an hmac of the user's password
  • This allows for session invalidation on password changes
• The user facing side of CTFd now has user and team searching
• Accept additional profile fields during registration (affiliation, website, country)
  • This does not add additional inputs. Themes or additional JavaScript can add the form inputs.

Admin Panel

• Use EasyMDE as an improved description/text editor for Markdown enabled fields.
• Media Library button now integrated into EasyMDE enabled fields
• VueJS now used as the underlying implementation for the Media Library
• Fix setting theme color in Admin Panel
• Green outline border has been removed from the Admin Panel
• GeoIP support now available for converting IP addresses to guessed countries
• Redesign the challenge creation form to use a radio button with challenge type selection instead of a select input

API

• Significant overhauls in API documentation provided by Swagger UI and Swagger json
• Make almost all API endpoints provide filtering and searching capabilities
• Change GET /api/v1/config/<config_key> to return structured data according to ConfigSchema
• Admins can no longer ban themselves through PATCH /api/v1/users/[user_id]
• Add html item for GET /api/v1/hints/[hint_id] which contains the rendered HTML of the Hint content
• Remove content from GET /api/v1/hints

Themes

• Themes now have access to the Configs global which provides wrapped access to get_config.
  • For example, {{ Configs.ctf_name }} instead of get_ctf_name() or get_config('ctf_name')
• Themes must now specify a challenge.html which control how a challenge should look.
• The main library for charts has been changed from Plotly to Apache ECharts.
• Forms have been moved into wtforms for easier form rendering inside of Jinja.
  • From Jinja you can access forms via the Forms global i.e. {{ Forms }}
  • This allows theme developers to more easily re-use a form without having to copy-paste HTML.
• Themes can now provide a theme settings JSON blob which can be injected into the theme with {{ Configs.theme_settings }}
• Core theme now includes the challenge ID in location hash identifiers to always refer the right challenge despite duplicate names
• Spinner centering has been switched from a hard coded margin in CSS to flexbox CSS classes from Bootstrap

Plugins

• Challenge plugins have changed in structure to better allow integration with themes and prevent obtrusive Javascript/XSS.
  • Challenge rendering now uses challenge.html from the provided theme.
  • Accessing the challenge view content is now provided by /api/v1/challenges/<challenge_id> in the view section. This allows for HTML to be properly sanitized and rendered by the server allowing CTFd to remove client side Jinja rendering.
  • challenge.html now specifies what's required and what's rendered by the theme. This allows the challenge plugin to avoid having to deal with aspects of the challenge besides the description and input.
  • A more complete migration guide will be provided when CTFd v3 leaves beta
• Display current attempt count in challenge view when max attempts is enabled
• get_standings(), get_team_stanadings(), get_user_standings() now has a fields keyword argument that allows for specificying additional fields that SQLAlchemy should return when building the response set.
  • Useful for gathering additional data when building scoreboard pages
• Flags can now control the message that is shown to the user by raising FlagException
• Fix override_template() functionality

Deployment

• Enable SQLAlchemy's pool_pre_ping by default to reduce the likelihood of database connection issues
• Mailgun email settings are now deprecated. Admins should move to SMTP email settings instead.
• Postgres is now considered a second class citizen in CTFd. It is tested against but not a main database backend. If you use Postgres, you are entirely on your own with regards to supporting CTFd.
• Docker image now uses Debian instead of Alpine. See CTFd#1215 for rationale.
• docker-compose.yml now uses a non-root user to connect to MySQL/MariaDB
• config.py should no longer be editting for configuration, instead edit config.ini or the environment variables in docker-compose.yml

Miscellaneous

• Fix an issue where email sending would be broken if the CTF name contained a colon
• Lint Markdown files with Prettier
• Lint Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml in Github Actions
• Lint JavaScript files with eslint
• Certain static strings have been converted into Enums for better re-useability throughout the code base
• Switch to using Github Actions for testing and linting
• Better handling of missing challenge types. Missing challenge types no longer bring down all other challenges.
• Documentation has been seperated out into a seperate repo (https://github.com/CTFd/docs).
• Documentation hosting has moved from ReadTheDocs to Netlify
• Any links in the codebase to help.ctfd.io have been changed to docs.ctfd.io.

3.0.0b3 / 2020-07-22

General

• Render Hint content on the server side and provide it in the Hint API response
  • In a sense this would deprecate the content field but it's left in for backwards compatability

API

• Add html item for GET /api/v1/hints/[hint_id] which contains the rendered HTML of the Hint content
• Remove content from GET /api/v1/hints

Admin Panel

• Fix an issue where an admin couldn't submit more than once on a challenge preview
• Fix an issue where the theme settings editor wouldn't load if the theme settings JSON was malformed

Miscellaneous

• Fix an issue where email sending would be broken if the CTF name contained a colon

3.0.0b2 / 2020-07-19

General

• Make HTML Sanitization an optional setting that's configurable via HTML_SANITIZATION in config.ini
• Allow HTML comments through sanitization
• Allow Bootstrap data attributes through sanitization

Admin Panel

• Fix an unclickable label in the Challenge creation interface

Plugins

• Fix bug preventing deleting alternative challenge types

Miscellaneous

• Switch to using Github Actions for testing and linting

3.0.0b1 / 2020-07-15

General

• Fix an issue where dynamic challenge solutions could not be submitted

Documentation

• Documentation has been seperated out into a seperate repo (https://github.com/CTFd/docs).
• Documentation hosting has moved from ReadTheDocs to Netlify
• Any links in the codebase to help.ctfd.io have been changed to docs.ctfd.io.

3.0.0a2 / 2020-07-09

General

• Accept additional profile fields during registration (affiliation, website, country)
  • This does not add additional inputs. Themes or additional JavaScript can add the form inputs.

Admin Panel

• Redesign the challenge creation form to use a radio button with challenge type selection instead of a select input

API

• Admins can no longer ban themselves through PATCH /api/v1/users/[user_id]

Themes

• Spinner centering has been switched from a hard coded margin in CSS to flexbox CSS classes from Bootstrap

Plugins

• Revert plugin menu (register_admin_plugin_menu_bar, register_user_page_menu_bar) changes to 2.x code

Miscellaneous

• Fix issue with Configs.ctf_name returning incorrect value
• Add prerender step back into challenges.js
• Better handling of missing challenge types. Missing challenge types no longer bring down all other challenges.

3.0.0a1 / 2020-07-01

General

• CTFd is now Python 3 only
• Render markdown with the CommonMark spec provided by cmarkgfm
• Render markdown stripped of any malicious JavaScript or HTML.
  • This is a significant change from previous versions of CTFd where any HTML content from an admin was considered safe.
• Inject Config, User, Team, Session, and Plugin globals into Jinja
• User sessions no longer store any user-specific attributes.
  • Sessions only store the user's ID, CSRF nonce, and an hmac of the user's password
  • This allows for session invalidation on password changes
• The user facing side of CTFd now has user and team searching
• GeoIP support now available for converting IP addresses to guessed countries

Admin Panel

• Use EasyMDE as an improved description/text editor for Markdown enabled fields.
• Media Library button now integrated into EasyMDE enabled fields
• VueJS now used as the underlying implementation for the Media Library
• Fix setting theme color in Admin Panel
• Green outline border has been removed from the Admin Panel

API

• Significant overhauls in API documentation provided by Swagger UI and Swagger json
• Make almost all API endpoints provide filtering and searching capabilities
• Change GET /api/v1/config/<config_key> to return structured data according to ConfigSchema

Themes

• Themes now have access to the Configs global which provides wrapped access to get_config.
  • For example, {{ Configs.ctf_name }} instead of get_ctf_name() or get_config('ctf_name')
• Themes must now specify a challenge.html which control how a challenge should look.
• The main library for charts has been changed from Plotly to Apache ECharts.
• Forms have been moved into wtforms for easier form rendering inside of Jinja.
  • From Jinja you can access forms via the Forms global i.e. {{ Forms }}
  • This allows theme developers to more easily re-use a form without having to copy-paste HTML.
• Themes can now provide a theme settings JSON blob which can be injected into the theme with {{ Configs.theme_settings }}
• Core theme now includes the challenge ID in location hash identifiers to always refer the right challenge despite duplicate names

Plugins

• Challenge plugins have changed in structure to better allow integration with themes and prevent obtrusive Javascript/XSS.
  • Challenge rendering now uses challenge.html from the provided theme.
  • Accessing the challenge view content is now provided by /api/v1/challenges/<challenge_id> in the view section. This allows for HTML to be properly sanitized and rendered by the server allowing CTFd to remove client side Jinja rendering.
  • challenge.html now specifies what's required and what's rendered by the theme. This allows the challenge plugin to avoid having to deal with aspects of the challenge besides the description and input.
  • A more complete migration guide will be provided when CTFd v3 leaves beta
• Display current attempt count in challenge view when max attempts is enabled
• get_standings(), get_team_stanadings(), get_user_standings() now has a fields keyword argument that allows for specificying additional fields that SQLAlchemy should return when building the response set.
  • Useful for gathering additional data when building scoreboard pages
• Flags can now control the message that is shown to the user by raising FlagException
• Fix override_template() functionality

Deployment

• Enable SQLAlchemy's pool_pre_ping by default to reduce the likelihood of database connection issues
• Mailgun email settings are now deprecated. Admins should move to SMTP email settings instead.
• Postgres is now considered a second class citizen in CTFd. It is tested against but not a main database backend. If you use Postgres, you are entirely on your own with regards to supporting CTFd.
• Docker image now uses Debian instead of Alpine. See CTFd#1215 for rationale.
• docker-compose.yml now uses a non-root user to connect to MySQL/MariaDB
• config.py should no longer be editting for configuration, instead edit config.ini or the environment variables in docker-compose.yml

Miscellaneous

• Lint Markdown files with Prettier
• Lint Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml in Github Actions
• Lint JavaScript files with eslint
• Certain static strings have been converted into Enums for better re-useability throughout the code base
• Main testing now done by Github Actions. Travis testing is deprecated but still used until full parity exists
• Travis testing has been upgraded to use Ubuntu Bionic (18.04)

2.5.0 / 2020-06-04

General

• Use a session invalidation strategy inspired by Django. Newly generated user sessions will now include a HMAC of the user's password. When the user's password is changed by someone other than the user the previous HMACs will no longer be valid and the user will be logged out when they next attempt to perform an action.
• A user and team's place, and score are now cached and invalidated on score changes.

API

• Add /api/v1/challenges?view=admin to allow admin users to see all challenges regardless of their visibility state
• Add /api/v1/users?view=admin to allow admin users to see all users regardless of their hidden/banned state
• Add /api/v1/teams?view=admin to allow admin users to see all teams regardless of their hidden/banned state
• The scoreboard endpoint /api/v1/scoreboard is now significantly more performant (20x) due to better response generation
• The top scoreboard endpoint /api/v1/scoreboard/top/<count> is now more performant (3x) due to better response generation
• The scoreboard endpoint /api/v1/scoreboard will no longer show hidden/banned users in a non-hidden team

Deployment

• docker-compose now provides a basic nginx configuration and deploys nginx on port 80
• Dockerfile now installs python3 and python3-dev instead of python and python-dev because Alpine no longer provides those dependencies

Miscellaneous

• The get_config and get_page config utilities now use SQLAlchemy Core instead of SQLAlchemy ORM for slight speedups
• The get_team_standings and get_user_standings functions now return more data (id, oauth_id, name, score for regular users and banned, hidden as well for admins)
• Update Flask-Migrate to 2.5.3 and regenerate the migration environment. Fixes using % signs in database passwords.

2.4.3 / 2020-05-24

Miscellaneous

• Notifications/Events endpoint will now immediately send a ping instead of waiting a few seconds.
• Upgrade gunicorn dependency to 19.10.0
• Upgrade boto3 dependency to 1.13.9
• Improve import_ctf() reliability by closing all connections before dropping & recreating database
• Close database session in IP tracking code in failure situations to avoid potential dangling database connections
• Don't allow backups to be imported if they do not have a db folder
• Change import_ctf() process slightly to import built-in tables first and then plugin tables
• Handle exception where a regex Flag is invalid

API

• File deletion endpoint (DELETE /api/v1/files/[file_id]) will now correctly delete the associated file

Plugins

• Add CTFd.plugins.get_plugin_names() to get a list of available plugins
• Add CTFd.plugins.migrations.current() to get the current revision of a plugin migration
• Improve CTFd.plugins.migrations.upgrade() to be able to upgrade to a specific plugin migration
• Run plugin migrations during import process

Themes

• Update jQuery to v3.5.1 to fix mobile hamburger menu
• Upgrade some dependencies in yarn lockfile
• Fix invalid team link being generated in scoreboard.js

Admin Panel

• Fix sending of user creation notification email
• Fix button to remove users from teams

2.4.2 / 2020-05-08

Admin Panel

• Fix Challenge Reset in Admin Panel where Dynamic Challenges prevented resetting Challenges

Plugins

• Add the CTFd.plugins.migrations module to allow plugins to handle migrations. Plugins should now call CTFd.plugins.migrations.upgrade instead of app.db.create_all which will allow the plugin to have database migrations.
• Make Dynamic Challenges have a cascading deletion constraint against their respective Challenge row

Miscellaneous

• Add app.plugins_dir object to refer to the directory where plugins are installed

2.4.1 / 2020-05-06

Admin Panel

• Fix issue where admins couldn't update the "Account Creation" email
• Fix issue where the Submissions page in the Admin Panel could not be paginated correctly

Miscellaneous

• Add SQLALCHEMY_ENGINE_OPTIONS to config.py with a slightly higher default max_overflow setting for SQLALCHEMY_MAX_OVERFLOW. This can be overridden with the SQLALCHEMY_MAX_OVERFLOW envvar
• Add node_modules/ to .dockerignore

2.4.0 / 2020-05-04

General

• Cache user and team attributes and use those perform certain page operations intead of going to the database for data
  • After modifying the user/team attributes you should call the appropriate cache clearing function (clear_user_session/clear_team_session)
• Cache user IPs for the last hour to avoid hitting the database on every authenticated page view
  • Update the user IP's last seen value at least every hour or on every non-GET request
• Replace flask_restplus with flask_restx
• Remove datafreeze, normality, and banal dependencies in favor of in-repo solutions to exporting database

Admin Panel

• Add bulk selection and deletion for Users, Teams, Scoreboard, Challenges, Submissions
• Make some Admin tables sortable by table headers
• Create a score distribution graph in the statistics page
• Make instance reset more granular to allow for choosing to reset Accounts, Submissions, Challenges, Pages, and/or Notificatoins
• Properly update challenge visibility after updating challenge
• Show total possible points in Statistics page
• Add searching for Users, Teams, Challenges, Submissions
• Move User IP addresses into a modal
• Move Team IP addresses into a modal
• Show User website in a user page button
• Show Team website in a team page button
• Make the Pages editor use proper HTML syntax highlighting
• Theme header and footer editors now use CodeMirror
• Make default CodeMirror font-size 12px
• Stop storing last action via location hash and switch to using sessionStorage

Themes

• Make page selection a select and option instead of having a lot of page links
• Add the JSEnum class to create constants that can be accessed from webpack. Generate constants with python manage.py build jsenums
• Add the JinjaEnum class to inject constants into the Jinja environment to access from themes
• Update jQuery to 3.5.0 to resolve potential security issue
• Add some new CSS utilities (.min-vh-* and .opacity-*)
• Change some rows to have a minimum height so they don't render oddly without data
• Deprecate .spinner-error CSS class
• Deprecate accessing the type variable to check user role. Instead you should use is_admin()

Miscellaneous

• Enable foreign key enforcement for SQLite. Only really matters for the debug server.
• Remove the duplicated get_config from CTFd.models
• Fix possible email sending issues in Python 3 by using EmailMessage
• Dont set User type in the user side session. Instead it should be set in the new user attributes
• Fix flask-profiler and bump dependency to 1.8.1
• Switch to using the Faker library for populate.py instead of hardcoded data
• Add a yarn lint command to run eslint on JS files
• Always insert the current CTFd version at the end of the import process
• Fix issue where files could not be downloaded on Windows

2.3.3 / 2020-04-12

General

• Re-enable the Jinja LRU Cache for significant speedups when returning HTML content

API

• POST /api/v1/unlocks will no longer allow duplicate unlocks to happen

Admin Panel

• Makes Account Visibility subtext clearer by explaining the Private setting in Config Panel

Themes

• Fixes an issue with using a theme with a purely numeric name
• Fixes issue where the scoreboard graph always said Teams regardless of mode

Miscellaneous

• Bump max log file size to 10 MB and fix log rotation
• Docker image dependencies (apk & pip) are no longer cached reducing the image size slightly

2.3.2 / 2020-03-15

General

• Fix awards not being properly assigned to teams in TEAMS_MODE

API

• Set /api/v1/statistics/users route to be admins_only
• When POST'ing to /api/v1/awards, CTFd will look up a user's team ID if team_id is not specified

Admin Panel

• Adds a setting to registration visibility to allow for MLC registration while registration is disabled
• Fix setting theme color during the setup flow and from the Admin Panel

Themes

• Fixes users/admins being able to remove profile settings.
  • Previously a bug prevented users from removing some profile settings. Now the core theme stores the initial value of inputs as a data attribute and checks for changes when updating data. This should be a temporary hack until a proper front-end framework is in place.
• Fix ezToast() issue that was keeping toast messages visible indefinitely
• Fix modal-body parameters in ezq.js for ezAlert and ezQuery and fix the progress bar for certain cases in ezProgressBar
• Use authed() function to check if user is authed in base.html. This fixes an issue where a page could look as if the user was logged in.

Miscellaneous

• Fix behavior for REVERSE_PROXY config setting when set to a boolean instead of a string
• Improve Dockerfile to run fewer commands and re-use the build cache
• Add make coverage to generate an HTML coverage report
• Update coverage and pytest-cov development dependencies

2.3.1 / 2020-02-17

General

• User confirmation emails now have the correct URL format

2.3.0 / 2020-02-17

General

• During setup, admins can register their email address with the CTFd LLC newsletter for news and updates
• Fix editting hints from the admin panel
• Allow admins to insert HTML code directly into the header and footer (end of body tag) of pages. This replaces and supercedes the custom CSS feature.
  • The views.custom_css route has been removed.
• Admins can now customize the content of outgoing emails and inject certain variables into email content.
• The manage.py script can now manipulate the CTFd Configs table via the get_config and set_config commands. (e.g. python manage.py get_config ctf_theme and python manage.py set_config ctf_theme core)

Themes

• Themes should now reference the theme_header and theme_footer configs instead of the views.custom_css endpoint to allow for user customizations. See the base.html file of the core theme.

Plugins

• Make ezq functions available to CTFd.js under CTFd.ui.ezq

Miscellaneous

• Python imports sorted with isort and import order enforced
• Black formatter running on a majority of Python code

2.2.3 / 2020-01-21

This release includes a critical security fix for CTFd versions >= 2.0.0

All CTFd administrators are recommended to take the following steps:

1. Upgrade their installations to the latest version
2. Rotate the SECRET_KEY value
3. Reset the passwords for all administrator users

Security

• This release includes a fix for a vulnerability allowing an arbitrary user to take over other accounts given their username and a CTFd instance with emails enabled

General

• Users will receive an email notification when their passwords are reset
• Fixed an error when users provided incorrect team join information

2.2.2 / 2020-01-09

General

• Add jQuery, Moment, nunjucks, and Howl to window globals to make it easier for plugins to access JS modules
• Fix issue with timezone loading in config page which was preventing display of CTF times

2.2.1 / 2020-01-04

General

• Fix issue preventing admins from creating users or teams
• Fix issue importing backups that contained empty directories

2.2.0 / 2019-12-22

Notice

2.2.0 focuses on updating the front end of CTFd to use more modern programming practices and changes some aspects of core CTFd design. If your current installation is using a custom theme or custom plugin with any kind of JavaScript, it is likely that you will need to upgrade that theme/plugin to be useable with v2.2.0.

General

• Team size limits can now be enforced from the configuration panel
• Access tokens functionality for API usage
• Admins can now choose how to deliver their notifications
  • Toast (new default)
  • Alert
  • Background
  • Sound On / Sound Off
• There is now a notification counter showing how many unread notifications were received
• Setup has been redesigned to have multiple steps
  • Added Description
  • Added Start time and End time,
  • Added MajorLeagueCyber integration
  • Added Theme and color selection
• Fixes issue where updating dynamic challenges could change the value to an incorrect value
• Properly use a less restrictive regex to validate email addresses
• Bump Python dependencies to latest working versions
• Admins can now give awards to team members from the team's admin panel page

API

• Team member removals (DELETE /api/v1/teams/[team_id]/members) from the admin panel will now delete the removed members's Submissions, Awards, Unlocks

Admin Panel

• Admins can now user a color input box to specify a theme color which is injected as part of the CSS configuration. Theme developers can use this CSS value to change colors and styles accordingly.
• Challenge updates will now alert you if the challenge doesn't have a flag
• Challenge entry now allows you to upload files and enter simple flags from the initial challenge creation page

Themes

• Significant JavaScript and CSS rewrite to use ES6, Webpack, yarn, and babel
• Theme asset specially generated URLs
  • Static theme assets are now loaded with either .dev.extension or .min.extension depending on production or development (i.e. debug server)
  • Static theme assets are also given a d GET parameter that changes per server start. Used to bust browser caches.
• Use defer for script tags to not block page rendering
• Only show the MajorLeagueCyber button if configured in configuration
• The admin panel now links to https://help.ctfd.io/ in the top right
• Create an ezToast() function to use Bootstrap's toasts
• The user-facing navbar now features icons
• Awards shown on a user's profile can now have award icons
• The default MarkdownIt render created by CTFd will now open links in new tabs
• Country flags can now be shown on the user pages

Deployment

• Switch Dockerfile from python:2.7-alpine to python:3.7-alpine
• Add SERVER_SENT_EVENTS config value to control whether Notifications are enabled
• Challenge ID is now recorded in the submission log

Plugins

• Add an endpoint parameter to register_plugin_assets_directory() and register_plugin_asset() to control what endpoint Flask uses for the added route

Miscellaneous

• CTFd.utils.email.sendmail() now allows the caller to specify subject as an argument
  • The subject allows for injecting custom variable via the new CTFd.utils.formatters.safe_format() function
• Admin user information is now error checked during setup
• Added yarn to the toolchain and the yarn dev, yarn build, yarn verify, and yarn clean scripts
• Prevent old CTFd imports from being imported

2.1.5 / 2019-10-2

General

• Fixes flask run debug server by not monkey patching in wsgi.py
• Fix CSV exports in Python 3 by converting StringIO to BytesIO
• Avoid exception on sessions without a valid user and force logout
• Fix several issues in Vagrant provisioning

API

• Prevent users from nulling out profile values and breaking certain pages

2.1.4 / 2019-08-31

General

• Make user pages show the team's score and place information instead of the user's information if in team mode
• Allow admins to search users by IP address
• Require password for email address changes in the user profile
• The place indicator in Teams Mode on the team pages and user pages now correctly excludes hidden teams
• Fix scoreboard place ordinalization in Python 3
• Fix for a crash where imports will fail on SQLite due to lack of ALTER command support
• Fix for an issue where files downloaded via S3 would have the folder name in the filename
• Make Users.get_place() and Teams.get_place() for return None instead of 0 if the account has no rank/place
• Properly redirect users or 403 if the endpoint requires a team but the user isn't in one
• Show affiliation in user and team pages in the admin panel and public and private user and team pages

Themes

• Remove invalid id='submit' on submit buttons in various theme files
• Set tabindex to 0 since we don't really care for forcing tab order
• Rename statistics.js to graphs.js in the Admin Panel as it was identified that adblockers can sometimes block the file

API

• The team profile endpoint (/api/v1/teams/me) will now return 403 instead of 400 if the requesting user is not the captain
• The Challenge API will now properly freeze the solve count to freeze time

2.1.3 / 2019-06-22

General

• Fix issue with downloading files after CTF end when view_after_ctf is enabled
• Sort solves in admin challenge view by date
• Link to appropriate user and challenge in team, user, and challenge pages
• Redirect to /team instead of /challenges after a user registers in team mode
• Fixes bug where pages marked as hidden weren't loading
• Remove data-href from pages.html in the Admin Panel to fix the delete button
• Add UI to handle team member removal in Admin Panel
• Fixes account links on the scoreboard page created by update(). They now correctly point to the user instead of undefined when in user mode.
• utils._get_config will now return KeyError instead of None to avoid cache misses

Deployment

• Use /dev/shm for --worker-tmp-dir in gunicorn in Docker
• Cache get_place code for users and teams.
• Install Flask-DebugToolbar in development
• Cache the /scoreboard page to avoid having to rebuild the response so often
• Make unprivileged ctfd user usable for mysql connection in docker-compose by having the db image create the database instead of CTFd
• Fix bug causing apache2 + mod_wsgi deployments to break

API

• Change /api/v1/teams/[team_id]/members from taking id to user_id.
  • Endpoint was unused so the API change is considered non-breaking.
• Add account_type and account_url field in /api/v1/scoreboard
• Separate /api/v1/[users,teams]/[me,id]/[solves,fails,awards] into seperate API endpoints
• Clear standings cache after award creation/deletion

Exports

• Temporarily disable foreign keys in MySQL, MariaDB, and Postgres during import_ctf()
• Add cache_timeout parameter to send_fileresponse in /admin/export to prevent the browser from caching the export

Tests

• Fix score changing test helpers to clear standings cache when generating a score changing row

2.1.2 / 2019-05-13

General

• Fix freeze time regressions in 2.x
  • Make /api/v1/[users,teams]/[me]/[solves,fails,awards] endpoints load as admin so users can see their solves after freeze
  • Make /api/v1/challenges/[id]/solves only show solves before freeze time
    • Add the ?preview=true GET parameter for admins to preview challenges solves as a user
• Team join attempts are now ratelimited

Tests

• More linting and autoformatting rules
  • Format Javascript and CSS files with prettier: prettier --write 'CTFd/themes/**/*'
  • Format Python with black: black CTFd and black tests
  • make lint and thus Travis now include the above commands as lint checks
• Travis now uses xenial instead of trusty.

2.1.1 / 2019-05-04

General

• Allow admins to hit /api/v1/challenges and /api/v1/challenges/[id] without having a team to fix challenge previews
• Fix rate-limiting of flag submission when using team mode
• Fixes some modal close buttons not working in the admin panel
• Fixes populate.py to assign captains to teams.

Models

• Added Challenges.flags relationship and moved the Flags.challenge relationship to a backref on Challenges
• Added ondelete='CASCADE' to most ForeignKeys in models allowing for deletions to remove associated data
  • Hints should be deleted when their Challenge is deleted
  • Tags should be deleted when their Challenge is deleted
  • Flags should be deleted when their Challenge is deleted
  • ChallengeFiles should be deleted when their Challenge is deleted
    • Deletion of the file itself is not handled by the model/database
  • Awards should be deleted when their user or team is deleted
  • Unlocks should be deleted when their user or team is deleted
  • Tracking should be deleted when their user or team is deleted
  • Teams.captain_id should be set to NULL when the captain user is deleted

Exports

• Force db.create_all() to happen for imports on sqlite or on failure to create missing tables
• Force ctf_theme to be set to core in imports in case a theme is missing from the import or the instance
• Fix imports/exports to emit and accept JSON properly under MariaDB
  • MariaDB does not properly understand JSON so it must accept strings instead of dicts
  • MariaDB outputs strings instead of JSON for its JSON type so the export serializer will attempt to cast output JSON strings to JSON objects

Deployment

• Run as root when using docker-compose
  • This is necessary to be able to write to the volumes mounted from the host

2.1.0 / 2019-04-24

General

• Remove Flask-SocketIO in favor of custom Server Side Events code
  • Removed the Flask-SocketIO dependency and removed all related code. See Deployment section.
  • Added EventSource polyfill from Yaffle/EventSource
  • Events are now rate-limited and only availble to authenticated users
    • This means real time notifications will only appear to authenticated users
  • Browser localStorage is now used to dictate which tab will maintain the persistent connection to the /events endpoint
    • Thanks to https://gist.github.com/neilj/4146038
  • Notifications (currently the only use of the events code) now appear with a notification sound
    • Thanks to Terrence Martin for the sound
• Added UI to delete and download files from the media library
• Progress bars have been added to some actions which could take time
  • To file uploads on challenge page
  • To file uploads on the page editor page
  • To the import CTF functionality
• Challenge file downloads now require a token to download
  • /files/<path> now accepts a ?token= parameter which is a serialized version of {user_id: <>, team_id: <>, file_id: <>}
  • If any of these sections are invalid or the user/team is banned the download is blocked
  • This allows files to be downloaded via curl or wget (i.e. without cookie authentication)
• Added a team captain concept. Team captains can edit team information such as name, team password, website, etc.
  • Only captains can change their team's captain
  • Captains are the first to join the team. But they can be transferred to the true captain later on
• Cache /api/v1/scoreboard and /api/v1/scoreboard/top/[count]
  • Adds cache.make_cache_key because Flask-Caching is unable to cleanly determine the endpoint for Flask-Restplus
  • This helper may change in a future release or be deprecated by an improvement in Flask-Caching
• Properly load hidden and banned properties in the admin team edit modal
• Adds a hover color change on table rows in the admin panel.
  • If a table row specifies the data-href attribute it will become clickable
• Add a simple Makefile to wrap some basic commands
  • make lint: lint the code base
  • make test: test the code base
  • make serve: create a debug application server
  • make shell: create a Python shell with the application preloaded
• Started work on a Sphinx documentation site available at https://docs.ctfd.io

Dependencies

• Upgraded SQLAlchemy to 1.3.3 for proper JSON columns in SQLite
• Pin Werkzeug==0.15.2 in requirements.txt
• Flask-Profiler added to serve.py --profile

Models

• Awards table now has a type column which is used as a polymorphic identity
• Add Teams.captain_id column to Teams table

API

• Added /api/v1/teams/[team_id]/members
• Cache /api/v1/scoreboard and /api/v1/scoreboard/top/[count]
  • Adds cache.make_cache_key because Flask-Caching is unable to cleanly determine the endpoint for Flask-Restplus
  • This helper may change in a future release or be deprecated by an improvement in Flask-Caching
• Add /api/v1/users?notify=true to email user & password after creating new account
• Fix issue where admins could not modify their own profile or their own team

Plugins

• CTFd.utils.security.passwords deprecated and now available at CTFd.utils.crypto
• Built-in challenge plugins now linkify challenge text properly
• Challenge type plugins do not have to append script_root to file downloads anymore as that will now be managed by the API
• Awards are now polymorphic and subtables can be created for them

Themes

• Fix spelling mistake in 500.html
• Removed socket.io.min.js from base.html
• Added EventSource polyfill from Yaffle/EventSource
• Added howler.js to play notification sounds
• Vendored/duplicated files which were shared between the admin and core themes have been de-duped
  • The files used in the core theme should now be considered free to use by other themes
• CTF start and end times are now injected into base.html and available in the CTFd.js object
• Register page now properly says "User Name" instead of "Team Name" since only users can see the Register page
• Users and Teams pages now use a public and private page.
  • user.html -> users/public.html and users/private.html
  • team.html -> teams/public.html and teams/private.html
• Separate admin/templates/modals/users/create.html into admin/templates/modals/users/edit.html

Exports

• Exports will now properly export JSON for all JSON columns
  • In some configurations the column would be exported as a string.
  • Legacy string columns will still be imported properly.
• Exports from old 2.x CTFd versions should upgrade and be installed properly
  • Any failure to do so should be considered a bug

Deployment

• User is no longer root in Docker image
  • Errors in writing log files will now fail silently as we expect a future rewrite
  • Logs will now also go to stdout
• Update Dockerfile to create and chown/chmod the folders used by docker-compose to store files/logs (/var/log/CTFd, /var/uploads)
  • This allows the container to write to the folder despite it being a volume mounted from the host
• Default worker changed back to gevent
• Removed Flask-SocketIO dependency
  • Removed the SOCKETIO_ASYNC_MODE config
• gevent is now required to allow the Server Sent Events client polling code to work
  • If you use the provided wsgi.py or gevent gunicorn workers, there shouldn't be any issues
• Cache /api/v1/scoreboard and /api/v1/scoreboard/top/[count] which is invalidated on new solves or every minute

Configuration

• Added SWAGGER_UI setting to config.py to control the existence of the /api/v1/ Swagger UI documentation
• Removed the SOCKETIO_ASYNC_MODE config
• Renamed docstring that referenced SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI to DATABASE_URL
• The REVERSE_PROXY configuration can be set to True or to a comma seperated string of integers (e.g. 1,1,1,1,1)
  • See https://werkzeug.palletsprojects.com/en/0.15.x/middleware/proxy_fix/#werkzeug.middleware.proxy_fix.ProxyFix
  • For example to configure x_for=1, x_proto=1, x_host=1, x_port=1, x_prefix=1 specify 1,1,1,1,1

Tests

• Tests are now executed in parallel
  • When using a non-memory database, test helpers will now randomize the database name to be able to parallelize execution
• Test tool switched from nosetests to pytest
• Lint tool switched from pycodestyle to flake8
• Basic security checking added using bandit
• Allow create_ctfd() test helper to take app configuration as an argument

2.0.6 / 2019-04-08

Security

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

General

• Users/Teams set to hidden or banned are no longer visible by other users
  • This affects the API and the main user interface. This does not affect admins
• Users without a Team can no longer view challenges when the CTF is in Team Mode

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().

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 / 2018-12-02

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)

1.1.2 / 2018-01-23

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

1.1.1 / 2018-01-08

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.

1.1.0 / 2017-12-22

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.

1.0.5 / 2017-10-25

• 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!

1.0.4 / 2017-09-09

• 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.
• The utils.get_config() function now checks for lower case and upper case values specified in config.py
• 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.

1.0.3 / 2017-07-01

• 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.

1.0.2 / 2017-04-29

• 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.

1.0.1 / 2017-03-08

• 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 / 2017-01-24

Implemented enhancements:

• 1.0.0 release! Things work!
• Manage everything from a browser
• Run Containers
• Themes
• Plugins
• Database migrations

Closed issues:

• Closed out 94 issues before tagging 1.0.0

Merged pull requests:

• Merged 42 pull requests before tagging 1.0.0