Capture the Flag (CTF) Competition

When is the competition?

Taking place at the end of sprint A (after Feb. 19, 2020) upon completion of EEL 4806.

About the competition

Hacking isn’t like the movies, where you’re facing off a hacker in real-time. Truth be told, security jobs in real life consist of auditing, finding vulnerabilities, patching, and repeating. To keep sharp, many security professionals enter the Capture the Flag (CTF) competition.

FIU students who complete EEL 4806 – Ethical Hacking – will enter the CTF competition this summer to strengthen their problem-solving skills, sharpen the hacking techniques they learned and gain critical hands-on practice.

How does the competition work?

CTF competitions are like an outdoor game, except over a network or online. Students will be divided into teams. One team will attempt to locate and capture the opposing’s team flag while protecting their own from other teams. In this competition, the flag can be a piece of code, hardware or a malicious file.

Even Google has its very own CTF challenge, which is available year-round.

The types of questions included in the competition are binary exploitation (making an application act differently than how it was intended to perform), reverse engineering (manipulating the program to your will), web exploitation (cover a wide range of different methods to exploit web-based resources), cryptography (encrypting or decrypting messages) and forensics (finding files or information hidden within other file types).