CTF Competitions

Capture The Flag Competitions simulate real-world cybersecurity scenarios, where individuals or teams work to solve a series of challenges related to various domains, such as cryptography, web security, network vulnerabilities, binary exploitation, and digital forensics.

Each challenge typically involves capturing "flags," which are hidden pieces of information or tokens that participants must find and submit to earn points.

CTF competitions can take different forms:

• Jeopardy-style: Participants are presented with a board of challenges organized by categories and difficulty levels. Each challenge has a point value based on its complexity, with more difficult challenges offering higher points

• Attack-defense: Teams are pitted against each other, and the competition has two main objectives: to defend their systems while attempting to exploit vulnerabilities in their opponents' systems

• Mixed CTF: Combines elements of both jeopardy-style and attack-defense formats. Participants can tackle individual challenges while also engaging in attack-defense scenarios

Also, for the challenges encountered in this type of competition, we can find several categories as follows:

• Cryptography: Encoding, decoding, decrypting, or encrypting data, breaking ciphers, or exploiting weaknesses in cryptographic systems or algorithms

• Web Security: Finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in web applications

• Binary Exploitation (PWN): Analyzing and exploiting vulnerabilities in compiled binary programs, such as buffer overflows, memory corruption, and use-after-free bugs, to gain unauthorized control of a system

• Forensics: Investigating and analyzing digital evidence, such as recovering deleted files, examining logs, analyzing disk images, and network packet analysis

• Reverse Engineering: Deconstruct software or binaries to understand how they work, often involving disassembling code to find hidden functionalities or bypass protections

• Miscellaneous (Misc): This is a catch-all category for challenges that don’t fit into other areas. Can include problem-solving, logic puzzles, and unconventional challenges

• OSINT: Focuses on gathering publicly available information to solve challenges. This can include searching social media, public records, or websites for hidden clues and patterns

• Mobile Security: Finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in mobile apps (Android/iOS), which can include reverse engineering APKs, bypassing security measures, and extracting sensitive information from mobile devices

• Cloud Security: Challenges centered around securing and exploiting cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud

• Hardware Hacking: Manipulating or exploiting physical devices, such as IoT devices or embedded systems, to gain access, bypass protections, or extract sensitive data

• Malware Analysis: Analyze malicious software to understand its behavior, purpose, and methods of infection, including static or dynamic analysis of the malware in a controlled environment

• Blockchain: Tests knowledge of blockchain technology, cryptocurrency, and smart contracts

• GamePwn: Finding and exploiting security flaws in video games or gaming environments, such as vulnerabilities in game servers, network communication, or game files

• AI-ML: Challenges related to attacking or defending AI and machine learning models

• Full-Pwn: Challenges that involve gaining complete control over a system, often involving a combination of techniques like privilege escalation, binary exploitation, and network attacks to fully compromise the target