Saturday, October 24, 2026
SilverHill is an offline Attack & Defense Capture The Flag (CTF) competition organised by d4rkc0de, the cybersecurity club of IIIT-Delhi, as part of the institute's annual technology festival ESYA 2026.
What it is Unlike a standard jeopardy-style CTF, SilverHill runs in the Attack & Defense format. Each team receives an isolated environment containing deliberately vulnerable services. Teams must simultaneously attack opponents' services to earn points and defend their own infrastructure by identifying, exploiting and patching vulnerabilities while keeping services available. Scoring rewards both successful attacks and sustained service uptime, with automated service monitoring and scoring used throughout.
Who it's for The competition is open to anyone interested in cybersecurity and CTFs. Inter-college teams are allowed, and inter-specialisation teams are explicitly permitted - participants from different branches and years may form a team. A basic understanding of cybersecurity, networking and computer systems is recommended. Team size is 1 to 6 members.
Skills and areas covered Participants may encounter challenges spanning web security, binary and system security, network security, vulnerability research, exploitation and defensive security.
Format and logistics
Rules and code of conduct Teams may attack only the assigned competition infrastructure of other participating teams. Attacking the college network, competition infrastructure, organiser systems or any external infrastructure is strictly prohibited, as are DoS/DDoS attacks. Teams must defend and maintain availability of their own services. Sharing flags, credentials, exploits or competition-sensitive information with other teams is prohibited unless explicitly permitted. Manipulating the scoring or monitoring systems is banned, and any vulnerability found in the underlying competition infrastructure must be reported to the organisers. Organisers reserve the right to disqualify violating teams, and their decisions on scoring, disputes and disqualifications are final.
About the organisers d4rkc0de is IIIT-Delhi's student-run security club, known for running hands-on CTFs and security workshops on campus. ESYA is IIIT-Delhi's flagship annual tech festival, bringing together students, developers and industry participants across competitions, talks and workshops.
Registration Registration deadline: 21 October 2026. Points of contact: Pranjal Solanki, Siddharth Sharma and Shawn Theo Moses. Email: d4rkc0de@sc.iiitd.ac.in.