A one-day open-source intelligence CTF. Nothing you need is hidden;it is simply scattered. Fifteen challenges, fifteen hours, and one rule that matters: everything stays passive.
The brief
TRACE runs for fifteen hours on one Saturday, on the Athena platform. You get a photograph with the street signs cropped out, a shipping manifest with one company name on it, a username that appears in four places, and you work outward until the answer is undeniable.
Every target in TRACE is purpose-built: invented people, invented companies, seeded across real public infrastructure. That means you can push as hard as you like on the artifacts without ever touching a real person's life, which is the only honest way to run an OSINT competition.
Fifteen challenges, deliberately. It opens with something a first-timer can solve in ten minutes and closes with something you will argue with yourself about for three hours. Come for one, stay for the other.
Schedule · all times IST (UTC+5:30)
Registration closesNo walk-ins. Accounts need to be provisioned before flags go live.
Flags liveAll fifteen challenges release at once.
Submissions close, scoreboard freezesThe event ends here. Nothing can be submitted, edited or viewed afterwards.
Solutions publishedFull author write-ups for all fifteen challenges, including the ones nobody solved.
What you leave with
A day of well-built puzzles, a public scoreboard to measure yourself against, and full author solutions the next morning. No entry fee and no prize pool, which also means no eligibility paperwork, no regional restrictions, and nobody with a reason to cheat the board.
Send us your write-up if you're pleased with a solve. Good ones get published with your name on them, which is worth more than a certificate to anyone reading your CV.
Rules of engagement
If a challenge ever leads you to a real person's private information, stop and mail the organisers. That is a bug in our challenge design, not a solve, and reporting it earns some points.
Registration
One entry per person. You'll get a confirmation mail straight away with your Athena username and password, ready for when accounts open the day before flags go live.Everyone plays alone, on the same board.
A confirmation is on its way to your inbox with your Athena username and password. It is the only copy we send, so keep it.
Please check your spam and junk folders. Login mails are the ones that get filtered. If nothing has arrived in ten minutes, look there first, then mail us.
Questions
No. OSINT is the friendliest entry point in the whole hobby, because the skill is patience rather than exploitation. It opens with challenges a beginner can land, and the platform walks you through submitting your first flag. Fifteen challenges in fifteen hours is a pace you can actually think at.
A browser, a notes app, and a habit of writing down where you found things. Free tiers of the usual public search and archive services cover everything. No paid subscription is required for any challenge, and none of them need a Linux setup.
Not as a team. TRACE is an individual competition, so you each register separately and each get your own account and your own place on the board. Nothing stops you sitting in the same room and comparing notes afterwards, but flags must not be shared during the window.
Dynamic scoring: a challenge is worth less as more people solve it, so early and rare solves count for more. Ties break on the timestamp of your last scoring solve. The board freezes when submissions close.
Never. Every subject, company, and account in TRACE is fabricated by the challenge authors and seeded across public infrastructure specifically for the event. If a trail leads you to a real private individual, that is a bug. Report it and you'll be credited some points.
Freely. Nothing is scheduled inside the window: no live rounds, no mandatory check-ins. Solve what you can, close the laptop for lunch, come back. People who pace themselves consistently outscore the ones who grind straight through.
Because the challenges are the point. TRACE has no entry fee and no prize pool, which means no eligibility paperwork, no regional restrictions, and no incentive to cheat a scoreboard. You get a hard, fair set of puzzles, a public ranking, and full solutions afterwards, the same reasons people play OSINT weekly on their own.