 Hello everyone! Thanks for joining us for this interview section. Before we begin, I would like to give a big shout out to the CTF team. Once again, they allowed all the players to dive in an incredible world. Thanks to them and to all the staff who made this possible. Hi, Eric and Marc-Olivier. Actually, you too are part of this incredible team as a scenario designer and a challenge designer. Could you please each describe what is your role? Yes, my name is Eric. My role as a scenario designer is to create an overarching story that surrounds every single challenge in the CTF. So that way we have a cohesive story to give more reason as to why people are working on. My name is Marco. My part is to create challenges and coordinate with Eric to create a challenge with a theme that merges well. Great, thank you. I have a question for Eric. How is the theme of a CTF created? Could you describe the steps involved in creating the theme? Naturally, CTFs are not necessarily a team. The goal is to have technical achievements, things that you exploit in different ways. Over time, what we figured out, it makes more sense when there's a team. The way that I find teams is by taking inspiration from everywhere. I look at what is going on in the world. I think of interesting stories. It's done way in advance because the team pays the way for all challenge designers. What I do is I think of a few ideas. I keep thinking about what could be an interesting NordSec team. Then I show my ideas to the challenge designers. When I feel that we're into something, we start with it. The challenge designers build around this team. It's a long effort, but it's always very interesting. I would say also, the team evolves over time. What was initially just a simple idea? For us, for this year, it was what if there were computers during medieval times? Just a one-liner, but now it evolves and it's much more precise. It's more rich because there's a story that is built through all the challenges. It's interesting. Thank you. This could be a question for both of you. How long does it take from the idea of the team to the finalization of the safety F, including the challenges and everything? I can start on my end. The initial idea was probably given, well, it was given last year. I think it was around last summer, actually, that we started to have a team. At this moment now, I have an overall draft idea and we pass it into the challenge designers. Marco? When we create a challenge, we mainly take the main team, the medieval team, and then we try to find a way to make it work. We play on words and stuff like that. Then Eric comes back with us to create a very big team that goes with it. It's not that complicated, but it's very fun. It's definitely very fun. Yeah, it seems so. Do you have any funny stories to share about the team creation and the challenge creation? Well, I know that this year, we're talking about medieval times, which it was different costumes, different way of thinking. We have a challenge at our work with Marco. I still feel guilty about this one. It's called kinder market. It's like kinder, but instead of finding a date for you, you find a date for your children. It's a very unusual challenge that we present. Marco was sometimes feeling weird about it. Are we really doing this? Yeah, we can do it. I still feel dirty, but it's fun. Any team solved it already. I'm glad about it. The conclusion to this particular scenario is a super positive one. It's about building peace with a neighbour kingdom. In the end, if the participants solve this track, they actually build what could be one of the first steps of creating peace for North Sectoria. It's a weird challenge, but we always try to bring it in a positive way. One thing about that challenge, it almost never come to light because it took me a lot of time to make it work under a container on Linux. We are very limited on the resources that we have and the database that I used is very demanding. I think it took me more than three months to make it work. I worked a lot with the infrastructure team to make it work. It was crazy. Even a week before the CTF started, it almost never came to light because it was taking too many resources and stuff. I'm glad it came to light and people were able to solve it. That's true. With many challenges, you have to be careful with the resources, obviously. Yes. How many volunteers are working on the CTF? This is a colossal endeavour. We have somewhat like 20 challenge designers that work and produce challenges. Then you have all the behind-the-scenes work, people that coordinate the efforts, people that do the communications, people that do the infrastructure also. For challenges, what people might think you are also, is that there's a lot of people that work behind the CTF. You see currently on your screen, you see a Nordsec 21 logo. That's one of our artists, Jeremy, who does an amazing job. All the kinder market photos are from Jeremy as well. The picture of the children that you look at, they are done by Jeremy. There's a lot of people that work to give life to this event. It's such a pride for us to do that and to bring that result to our participants. All these people, how many tracks are created by CTF? This year is very impressive. Actually, this year, I think there's more tracks than the two previous years combined. It's absolutely crazy. We have what? It's really hard to say first CTF because it depends on how many challenge designers that you have. It depends on the time that they have. I know some people that do challenges year by year. This year, they went there. With them, it would have been even bigger. It depends on how many people that wants to pitch in. You don't have to be a pentester or somebody on the blue team or whatever to create a challenge. Anybody can create a challenge. This was actually my next question. In what areas do the volunteers of the CTF team work? You said you don't have to be a pentester. Anybody can create a challenge. It depends on what you want to do. If you want to do a physical challenge, you don't need any web expertise. You don't need network expertise. It depends on what you want to do. Laurent did a lot of the luck-picking over the years as well. You don't have to be a pentester to be able to do that. To make a good challenge designer, I would say you need experience. You need to do a lot of CTFs. That is when you realize what you like in the challenge and what you don't like in the challenge. Because a challenge that is too gassy, it's not fun for anyone. You really prefer to have a challenge that shows you where to go. From there, you try to work your way around it. The experience in your field, like pentester, blue team, purple team, web developer, anything can work. You need to have creativity, of course. But what can help? For me, what can help is all the mandates that I have throughout the year. Because many of my challenges, I take real mandates, real-life situations, and then I make a challenge about it. It's astonishing because you can find those things in real life, but it's true. If you work as a pentester and you see a lot of these things, you can make challenges really easily. That's something super nice with the wide variety of volunteers that we have. All these people have their own experience. They can bring into the CTF what they've seen. With the team now, we just put it into a different color. Even if you're doing weird things in a medieval team CTF, you're actually doing real things on the field that you can have to do. We have an incident response track this year. That's amazing. That's very blue team. That's very procedure and investigative, but it's real experience that you will get in the field. Cybersecurity is so large. There are so many skill sets involved. It's not one single set of skills and type of activities. We go from data science to web development, networking, and reverse engineering. All these things come into play, and it's thanks to the variety of volunteers that we have that we can make this so rich. Yeah, this is so cool. This field is so big. It's so cool to be able to have it in a CTF. This year, there is a beginner track, and it's good because it's an introduction to all those different fields. That's really amazing. That track, I'm proud of it because I made it all by myself. It was an idea that many North Sex before they wanted to do it, and this year I came in. I'm new to the Chinese designer team, so I took the responsibility to create a full track for beginners. I see that it's not that easy. Some people are still struggling with it, but many people learned. I got great comments on it. A lot of people talked to me about it, so I'm pretty proud of that one. Cool. Are there any challenges that you are most proud of? I'll say Kindermarket is one of them, but GoldConnect is one of my favorites. We made it last minute, and it was a team effort, so it was not just me, it was also Maxim Nadeau, David Lebrun, and Nicolas Lamour. We created that big challenge. It has six flags, including one that is worth nothing. It's just a meme. It's just for fun, but it's a very big track. It's worth a lot of points, and it's very fun, but we had some challenges with it because it's running on Windows, and it takes a lot of resources. I like that one very much because it's also based on a real-life situation, so it's super fun. When I found this in real life, I was super excited. Talking about resources, are there any challenges that you had to lost because they would take too many resources? We haven't lost any so far, I believe, but we came close to lose, like, Kindermarket. We came close to lose GoldConnect as well. We were close to lose, I don't remember the name, but it's like a three-container one made by Max and Nado. Most of them were running Java, and Java takes a lot of RAM, and we are very limited on resources per container that we have. It's crazy, but we made it work, and we are proud of the challenges as we created. We also tried stuff throughout the year. We have tried to install the SSDual on Linux, but it takes, again, a lot of RAM and a lot of resources, so we decided to make it on Windows Box instead. We've got a lot of challenges, creating challenges because of resources and stuff. Were there a challenge that was particularly difficult to implement? I'll say Kindermarket is one of them because I haven't played that much with the database that I used, and I remember playing with it in college, but it's a long time ago, during only one class, so I don't remember everything, but I made it work and it helped me a lot with this, to install the language that I used, to install the database, to make them work together and stuff, so it helped me a lot with that as well. This is amazing. All this great energy between your teammates, so I'm really thinking of joining the team one day. It looks really like a great experience. By the way, if there are people in the audience who are interested in the challenge or scenario design, how can they apply to be a volunteer? So there's on the website, there's a way to subscribe as a volunteer, so you can go in there. But of course, for challenge designers, we do like to make sure that we recruit people with experience, so one of the best ways actually to become a challenge designer is to win the NordSec, after just like someone like Marco, when someone wins the NordSec for a few years, these people are good, these people understand and want to give the chance. So yeah, you might be recruited just like that. For scenario design, this is a bit different because I'm working as... I create the story and it's one narrative and historically I've managed it all by myself, and it's a lot of effort. And I think maybe next year I would like to share the work. So if someone is interested, just hit me up and just ask and we can check how we could have this done. So yeah. Cool. Well, thank you very much, Eric and Marco Olivier. I hope the audience enjoyed as much as I did. I had a lot of fun with YouTube and thanks for sharing with us what's behind the curtains when you build a CTF. And on this note, I wish all the players good luck and enjoy the rest of the CTF. So bye and back to you, Sébastien. Bye. Bye-bye.