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What is Biterra CTF?

Biterra CTF is a platform for creating, hosting, teaching, and playing cyber security challenges. It brings the pieces of a CTF together in one place: event setup, registration, teams, challenge maps, scoring, hints, progression rules, dashboards, announcements, and guided Labs.

Use Biterra when you want people to learn by doing. Organisers build a world, decide who can join, add challenges, and run the event. Players sign in, register, join a team, open the map, and solve tasks to earn points.

If you already know what you need, start with Join your first event, Run your first CTF, or Before you launch.

What can you use it for?​

Biterra is designed for cyber learning experiences where the platform should handle the event mechanics so you can focus on the content and the people.

  • Public or private CTF events - Run a short competition, a weekend event, a club night, or a larger challenge series with teams and a scoreboard.
  • Classrooms and workshops - Give learners a controlled place to practise web, crypto, forensics, reversing, Linux, and other security topics.
  • Internal training - Build company or organisation-specific exercises with invite-only access, teams, announcements, and progress tracking.
  • Hiring and assessment - Host practical challenge sets that show how candidates approach technical security problems.
  • Self-paced learning - Use Labs for guided courses, topic practice, and structured learning paths outside a live event.
  • Attack/defence style checks - Use supported checker workflows when your event needs service health checks and round-based validation.

How Biterra fits together​

Most Biterra work happens in a few connected areas:

  • Customer Portal - The main portal at ctf.biterra.co. Players use it to find events, register, join teams, and access maps. Organisers use it to manage organisations, worlds, users, teams, settings, billing, and Labs access.
  • Organisations - Workspaces that own members, worlds, plan limits, billing, and Labs access.
  • Worlds - Organiser-owned records for CTF events. A world stores the event settings, access rules, teams, users, boosts, and entry points.
  • Events - The player-facing version of a world. Players discover events, register, and use Access when the event is available.
  • World control panel - The admin area for one world. Use it to build categories, challenges, progression, imports, announcements, dashboards, and score logs.
  • Labs - Guided courses for learning concepts and practising techniques outside a timed event map.

Player flow​

  1. Sign in or register in the Customer Portal.
  2. Open Events or use a direct event link.
  3. Register for the event while registration is open.
  4. Create a team or join an existing team if the event uses teams.
  5. Use Access when the event is live, or shortly before start when countdown access is available.
  6. Solve challenges on the map and watch the scoreboard if the organiser has enabled it.

For the step-by-step version, see Join your first event or the Players guides.

Organiser flow​

  1. Choose or create the organisation that owns the event.
  2. Create a world from Worlds.
  3. Configure settings, access type, dates, users, teams, homepage, boosts, and scoreboard options.
  4. Enter the world control panel.
  5. Build categories, challenges, progression, announcements, and score-log workflows.
  6. Test registration, access, map visibility, submissions, and scoring before sharing widely.
  7. Monitor dashboard metrics and logs during the event.

For the step-by-step version, see Run your first CTF or the Organisers guides.

Common terms​

  • Event access code - A code that unlocks registration for an invite-only event.
  • Team invite code - A code that puts a player into a specific team.
  • Progression - Rules that control when challenges appear or unlock.
  • Challenge Bank - A reusable source of challenges that organisers can import into a world.
  • Boosts - Per-world add-ons or upgrades for a specific event.
  • Organisation roles are not the same as world roles.
  • Labs are guided courses, not timed CTF event maps.

For the full list of terms, use the Glossary.