Related papers: Evidence of Cognitive Biases in Capture-the-Flag C…
Cybersecurity training has become a crucial part of computer science education and industrial onboarding. Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions have emerged as a valuable, gamified approach for developing and refining the skills of…
Capture-the-Flag (CTF) competitions are increasingly becoming a testbed for evaluating AI capabilities at solving security tasks, due to the controlled environments and objective success criteria. Existing evaluations have focused on how…
The concept of Capture the Flag (CTF) games for practicing cybersecurity skills is widespread in informal educational settings and leisure-time competitions. However, it is not much used in university courses. This paper summarizes our…
Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions represent a powerful experiential learning approach within cybersecurity education, blending diverse concepts into interactive challenges. However, the short duration (typically 24-48 hours) and ephemeral…
Identifying the actual adversarial threat against a system vulnerability has been a long-standing challenge for cybersecurity research. To determine an optimal strategy for the defender, game-theoretic based decision models have been widely…
Large language models are rapidly changing how learners acquire and demonstrate cybersecurity skills. However, when human--AI collaboration is allowed, educators still lack validated competition designs and evaluation practices that remain…
Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions are powerful pedagogical tools for addressing the global cybersecurity workforce gap, yet their effective K-12 implementation is often undermined by significant barriers, including educator preparedness…
Team collaboration among individuals with diverse sets of expertise and skills is essential for solving complex problems. As part of an interdisciplinary effort, we studied the effects of Capture the Flag (CTF) game, a popular and engaging…
In cybersecurity, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) serve as a vital defensive layer against adversarial threats. Accurate benchmarking is critical to evaluate and improve IDS effectiveness, yet traditional methodologies face limitations…
Variations of the Flip-It game have been applied to model network cyber operations. While Flip-It can accurately express uncertainty and loss of control, it imposes no essential resource constraints for operations. Capture the flag (CTF)…
Capture-the-Flag (CTF) competitions serve as gateways into offensive cybersecurity, yet they often present steep barriers for novices due to complex toolchains and opaque workflows. Recently, agentic AI frameworks for cybersecurity promise…
Are Capture-the-Flag competitions obsolete? In 2025, Cybersecurity AI (CAI) systematically conquered some of the world's most prestigious hacking competitions, achieving Rank #1 at multiple events and consistently outperforming thousands of…
Cyberspace is an ever-evolving battleground involving adversaries seeking to circumvent existing safeguards and defenders aiming to stay one step ahead by predicting and mitigating the next threat. Existing mitigation strategies have…
Capture The Flag (CTF) challenges are puzzles related to computer security scenarios. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), more and more CTF participants are using LLMs to understand and solve the challenges. However, so far no…
Deception plays a key role in adversarial or strategic interactions for the purpose of self-defence and survival. This paper introduces a general framework and solution to address deception. Most existing approaches for deception consider…
Attributing the culprit of a cyber-attack is widely considered one of the major technical and policy challenges of cyber-security. The lack of ground truth for an individual responsible for a given attack has limited previous studies. Here,…
Cognitive vulnerabilities shape human decision-making and arise primarily from two sources: (1) cognitive capabilities, which include disparities in knowledge, education, expertise, or access to information, and (2) cognitive biases, such…
Industry standard frameworks are now widespread for labeling the high-level stages and granular actions of attacker and defender behavior in cyberspace. While these labels are used for atomic actions, and to some extent for sequences of…
Adversaries (hackers) attempting to infiltrate networks frequently face uncertainty in their operational environments. This research explores the ability to model and detect when they exhibit ambiguity aversion, a cognitive bias reflecting…
According to a recent survey with more than 4000 software developers, less than half of developers can spot security holes. As a result, software products present a low-security quality expressed by vulnerabilities that can be exploited by…