Security & CTFs
Cybersecurity is how I got into code.
Before I was writing backend systems, I was breaking them. I ran my first CTF challenge in college, got hooked, ended up on a team, and eventually co-organized one of my own. That background shapes how I write production software now — I assume things break, I look for the boundary conditions, and I don’t trust inputs.
Feature
NoEscape CTF 2022 / NECTF
A jeopardy-style international CTF organized out of Roorkee Institute of Technology in November 2022. Two-person core team. 24-hour online event with a parallel onsite component — 137 teams registered on CTFtime, 400+ active participants from 25+ countries competing on challenges in web, pwn, forensics, steganography, crypto, OSINT, and trivia.
- Participating teams
- 137
- NoEscape CTF 2022
- Participants
- 400+
- from 25+ countries
- CTFtime weight
- 20.17
- first-run event rating
- Core team
- 2
- organizers
The hard part wasn’t writing challenges. It was everything else: infrastructure that didn’t collapse under load, scoring and flag-submission that worked under partitions, a communications plan for 25+ time zones, and judging escalations at 3 AM. I learned more about running reliable systems from that weekend than from most production incidents since.
Team
F7 Conquerors
I’ve competed and organized with F7 Conquerors — an India-based CTF team active on CTFtime since 2012. My active era was 2022–2023, around NECTF and the finals/quals listed below.
- Team
- F7 Conquerors
- CTFtime team 206244
- India rank (current)
- #87
- 2026 year-to-date
- India rank (best)
- #20
- 2016–2017
- Events, all time
- 60+
- across team history
Stats pulled from CTFtime (team 206244). Ranks are country-wide (India); the team has peaked at India #20 in 2016–2017.
Competed
CTFs I’ve played
A curated set during my active era — skewed toward international high-weight events.
- CSAW CTF Qualification Round w 23.76 2023
- COMPFEST CTF w 14.45 2023
- ASIS CTF Finals w 93.32 2022
- X-MAS CTF w 24.34 2022
- ISITDTU CTF 2022 Quals w 40.70 2022
- MetaRed International CTF w 35.21 2022
- p4ctf 2022 w 57.74 2022
- EKOPARTY CTF 2022 w 50.00 2022
Hackathon
Smart India Hackathon 2022 — Grand Finale
Built Verifi, an offline OTP authentication system, for a DRDO problem statement. The challenge was real: field authentication in environments where connectivity is adversarial or absent. We designed a scheme that worked with seeded secrets + time-based derivation, no live server call required.
The project made it to the Grand Finale — the top shortlist out of thousands of participating teams nationally.
Profiles