Lessons Learned from Five Years of Building Capture the Flag

Presented at DEF CON China Beta (2018), May 11, 2018, 3 p.m. (60 minutes).

Capture the Flag is the ultimate test of hacker skill, and DEF CON is the oldest and most prestigious CTF venue. After five years running DEF CON CTF with Legitimate Business Syndicate, our journey running this series of games has come to a close, but what remain are the lessons we learned along the way. This presentation will cover topics about all aspects of CTF organization: the history of CTF, building a cross-functional organizing team that sticks together year after year, developing a game infrastructure that handles the onslaught of attacks from players, and the stories behind some of the most difficult CTF challenges ever built.

Presenters:

• Vito Genovese - Member, Legitimate Business Syndicate
  Vito Genovese is a founding member of Legitimate Business Syndicate, organizers of DEF CON Capture the Flag from 2013 to 2017. Vito's work included building infrastructure for distributed software development, designing and building both cloud-based and on-site scoring systems for CTF, visual design and branding of competition materials, picking fonts, sourcing coffee and other beverages, and writing public material for the Legitimate Business Syndicate blog and Twitter accounts.

Links:

• https://defcon.org/html/defcon-china/dc-cn-speakers.html#Genovese
• https://infocon.org/cons/DEF CON/DEF CON China beta/DEF CON China beta videos/DEF CON China beta - Vito Genovese - Lessons learned from five years of DEF CON CTF (en).mp4
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ6Zk1tP9JU

Similar Presentations:

• DEF CON 17 (2009) / Maximum CTF: Getting the Most Out of Capture the Flag
• DEF CON 25 (2017) / The Last CTF Talk You'll Ever Need: AMA with 20 years of DEF CON Capture-the-Flag organizers
• Diana Initiative 2020 Virtual / Introduction to Capture-the-Flag (CTF)