Related papers: CTF as a Service: A reproducible and scalable infr…
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…
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 this paper, we present CTF Pilot, a GitOps-based framework for the deployment and management of Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions. By leveraging Git repositories as the single source of truth for challenge definitions and…
Organizations have rapidly shifted infrastructure and applications over to public cloud computing services such as AWS (Amazon Web Services), Google Cloud Platform, and Azure. Unfortunately, such services have security models that are…
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…
This article examines the integration of IT competitions, in particular Capture The Flag, into an information systems management course to fill skills gaps, particularly in the field of cybersecurity. An educational CTF team has been set up…
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…
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…
This paper lays out two teaching/learning methods that are becoming increasingly prevalent in computer science - hackathons, and Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions - and the pedagogic theory that underpins them. A case study of each is…
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled agentic systems for complex, multi-step tasks; cybersecurity is emerging as a prominent application. To evaluate such agents, researchers widely adopt Capture The Flag (CTF)…
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…
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 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…
Understanding how cognitive biases influence adversarial decision-making is essential for developing effective cyber defenses. Capture-the-Flag (CTF) competitions provide an ecologically valid testbed to study attacker behavior at scale,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are being deployed across various domains today. However, their capacity to solve Capture the Flag (CTF) challenges in cybersecurity has not been thoroughly evaluated. To address this, we develop a novel method…
Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions are increasingly important for the Brazilian cybersecurity community as education and professional tools. Unfortunately, CTF platforms may suffer from security issues, giving an unfair advantage to…
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…
Agentic large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated on cybersecurity tasks using capture-the-flag (CTF) benchmarks, yet existing pointwise benchmarks offer limited insight into agent robustness and generalisation across…
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…
In this paper, we take a close look at how CTF can be used in cybersecurity education. We divide the CTF competitions into four different categories, which are attack-based CTFs, defense-based CTFs, jeopardy CTFs and gamified and wargames…