The Forge
Real tools for real work — the kingdom's answer to the empty chat box.
The Problem
A normal AI chat box can talk about hacking, but it can't do any of it. It has no terminal, no files, no tools. It cannot open the strange file a challenge hands you, run the decoder, take a compiled program apart, or listen to a network capture.
In a real competition that means the human does every step by hand while the AI narrates — and on a phone or a Chromebook, whole categories of challenges are simply impossible. That is how most AI "help" at a CTF actually goes, and it is not a small handicap. It is the whole game.
The Court's Answer
Our seats don't work that way. Each seat of this court sits at a real terminal on a real machine, so the work actually gets done: files opened, tools run, outputs checked against the claim before anyone believes them.
That difference — tools, not talk — is most of why our teams finish boards at all.
The Plan — One-Click Workstations
The Forge brings the same idea to every player: a full desktop in the browser (Webtop), one click, and you sit down at a bench already stocked with the kit a competition actually needs:
- Python — the scripting bench everything else stands on.
- CyberChef — the encoder and decoder workbench.
- Ghidra — for taking compiled programs apart and reading them.
- tshark — for reading network captures, packet by packet.
- z3 — the solver: constraints, logic, and crypto problems that fall to math.
No installs, no borrowed laptop, no "this challenge needs a Linux machine you don't have." The bench is the point.
True Status
Planned — not installed. The workstation containers are not yet installed on this box, and no bench exists yet. This page describes the design honestly; when the workstations are built and proven, this section will say so and carry the date it was verified.