Overview

The UCSB International Capture The Flag (also known as the iCTF) is a distributed, wide-area security exercise, whose goal is to test the security skills of the participants. The Capture The Flag contest is multi-site, multi-team hacking contest in which a number of teams compete independently against each other.

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 other teams’ services. Since all the teams received an identical copy of the virtual host, 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.

Information

This year’s iCTF will be held on December 4th, 2009, from 11:00 AM to 8:00 PM (8:00 AM – 5:00 PM PST). Please consider this to be an ALL DAY EVENT. We strongly encourage you to stay the full day as a lot can happen in a short amount of time.

Applications

The application deadline was Friday, November 6th, 2009. We are currently in the process of holding short and informal (5-10 minute) interviews as we form the team. The purpose of the application and interview is to identify people’s strengths, and not to restrict people based on their technical expertise. If you are still interested in participating in iCTF but did NOT complete the application, please contact Tim Nary at tjn5026@psu.edu.