iCTF

The International Capture The Flag (“iCTF”) is a distributed, wide-area security exercise, which aims to test the security skills of the participants. It is the world’s largest and longest-running educational hacking competition that integrates both attack and defense aspects in a live setting.

iCTF is held once a year. Recent iCTF contests are organized by Prof. Giovanni Vigna of the Department of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara together with Shellphish, as well as Prof. Adam Doupé together with pwndevils.

Overview

The UC Santa Barbara Capture The Flag contest is multi-site, multi-team hacking contest in which a number of teams compete independently against each other.

In traditional editions of the iCTF competition, the goal of each team is to maintain a set of services such that they remain available and uncompromised throughout the contest phase. Each team also has to attempt to compromise the other teams’ services. Since all the teams received an identical copy of the virtual host containing the vulnerable services, each team has to find vulnerabilities in their copy of the hosts and possibly fix the vulnerabilities without disrupting the services. At the same time, the teams have to leverage their knowledge about the vulnerabilities they found to compromise the servers run by other teams. Compromising a service allows a team to bypass the service’s security mechanisms and to “capture the flag” associated with the service.