Blog Posts

Project Overview

So what is Pythax going to do, anyways? Well, to answer that question let’s first take a look at what Raytheon Technologies (RTX) has done so far.

Currently, the Capture the Flag Jeopardy application is being used as a form of internal training as a part of the RTX Cyber Learning Center. It’s acting as a capstone assignment for a few courses, and they have a decently large collection of challenges to fit their curriculum which they pull from to create each new CTF competition. The UI is currently functional and allows the admin of a CTF to create a game board which has a unique shape to it. In a typical Jeopardy game one might expect to see columns of categorized questions, but in this setting there might be gaps in some columns and rows to create an interesting image. 

So how do we improve this? We start by identifying the aspects of the platform that just aren’t working the way they’re supposed to. We’ve figured this out by talking with our liaison engineer at RTX, and by interacting with the platform ourselves a bit as well. In tandem with this process, we also were given some requirements and expectations from RTX. From this step comes the concept generation step, where we begin to ideate and determine some approaches that can be taken to fix broken features, add new functionality, improve aesthetics, and add new challenges.

We’ll be getting into more detail on each step of the process in future blog posts. For now, we’re moving into a brainstorming stage to come up with some cohesive concept designs!

Baby Steps

This past week has been a busy one! Outside of the various career fair events going on concurrently, this week has been an opportunity for Pythax to do some brand revisions, meet with our liaison engineer from Raytheon, and begin to narrow down some of the major steps towards achieving success with our CTF project.

During the weekly course lecture, teams were able to present their logos and team names in order to get some feedback from peers and course administrators. This feedback proved to be quite useful, and has helped us at Pythax to narrow down our logo to be easier on the eyes:

We’ve also been able to speak with our liaison engineer from Raytheon, and have received the system which we’ll be updating and modifying. It’s a web application primarily written using Python, with some elements of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS sprinkled in as well. There were some initial hiccups with getting the system to run on our virtual machines, but those have since been cleared up and we’ll now be able to peek at the code as well as test the baseline system in the next week!

Lastly, this week gave us an opportunity to narrow down some specific goals to ensure our progress is smooth and documented. We’ll be omitting these finer details from this blog, for the sake of readability (and suspense?). But rest assured, Pythax has its eye on the future!

Until next time, thanks for tuning in for this weekly update!

Team Pythax Assembles!

With the beginning of a new semester come new introductions, assignments, and lots of internal shuffling. Times like this also provide an opportunity to set firm goals and establish responsibilities for ourselves.

So what is Pythax? We’re a group of 4 computer science seniors who share a common interest in software development. Our individual backgrounds encompass a wide range of technical disciplines, from backend to frontend and everything in between.

We’ve been tasked with the mission of improving upon an existing CTF platform for Raytheon, which will follow a similar template to Jeopardy. In the coming weeks and months we will be planning and executing the specific improvements we wish to make, taking into account aesthetics, UI, UX, and other core design principles.

This week, we’ve been keeping ourselves busy with getting up to speed on various web frameworks and CTF platforms. We also came to a decision on a team name (as you might already have surmised, it’s Pythax), and a logo!

Pythax Logo

That’s about all we have for this week, but we’ll be posting regular updates on our progress through this project, so be sure to check in so you don’t miss out!