hackthespace

Hack the Space is a cyber security CTF-like game created for the 15th SFI Academic IT Festival. The game consists of 12 puzzles in the field of cryptanalysis, steganography, reverse engineering, and web application security.

The game is built in Rust with the Cot web framework.

Dependencies

• A Rust toolchain (edition 2024, Rust 1.94 or newer)
• A C compiler (needed to build the bundled SQLite)

Debian

sudo apt install build-essential

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S base-devel

The Bootstrap sources live in a git submodule, so clone the repository recursively (or run git submodule update --init in an existing clone):

git clone --recursive git@github.com:m4tx/hackthespace.git

Quick Start

Static assets (CSS and generated images) are produced by build.rs, and the HTML templates are compiled into the binary, so a single command builds and serves everything:

cargo run

The development server starts at http://127.0.0.1:8000 using the config/dev.toml configuration. The SQLite database is created and migrated automatically on the first run.

Deployment

The recommended way to deploy is via the prebuilt container image published to the GitHub Container Registry on every push:

docker compose up -d

compose.yml pulls ghcr.io/m4tx/hackthespace:master. To build the image locally instead, use compose.dev.yml:

docker compose -f compose.dev.yml up -d --build

The container listens on port 8000. Both compose files mount the local config/ directory into the container (read-only), so the configuration stays editable from the host; by default the server uses config/dev.toml. For a custom deployment, copy config/prod.toml.example to config/prod.toml, set a random hex secret_key, and start the server with -c prod (e.g. by overriding the container command).

To run without Docker, build the release binary and run it from a directory containing the config/ folder:

cargo build --release
./target/release/hackthespace -c prod -l 0.0.0.0:8000

Write-up

There is a short description of the puzzles available in the docs/ directory.

Attribution

First party

Other people taking part in the development of the game, but not present as the authors of the commits:

• Storyline
  • @mdymek
• Graphics
  • Maksymilian Szymczak
  • Patrycja Kochan
• Name, Terms of Service
  • Jan Kubierecki
• Testing, ideas
  • @apardyl
  • Marta Kondratowicz
  • Mateusz Hordyński
  • @pitpo

Third party

The repository contains files of the following third-party projects:

• Bootstrap licensed under the MIT license
• Neon Glow Theme licensed under the MIT license
• jQuery Terminal Emulator licensed under the MIT license
• Open Iconic licensed under the MIT license, fonts licensed under the Open Font License