Capture The Flag Begins Today!

The students in the CSE 4243/6243 Information Security class at Mississippi State University will begin their end-of-semester CTF exercise today, and in a change of format, it will be for a much longer period of time.  In previous semesters, we have run this exercise during class time, with laptops in one of the classrooms.  This semester, in order to give them more time and opportunity to research obstacles in their way, I have set the game up in our security lab, and it will run from the end of class today (10 AM) to the beginning of class on Monday (9 AM).

There are five teams of students, and each will be racing to find a series of “flags” (10-character hexadecimal students l strings) that are scattered among a series of target computers.  As they find these flags, they will be submitting them to a scoring server to increase their score.  Since the are of varying levels of experience, we have strict rules against attacking other teams directly (though passive monitoring is allowed).

The students have always enjoyed the CTF in the past, and I believe that the new time format will make it even more fun and instructive.  The student teams have been meeting and preparing for some time now, and are very excited.  My favorite team name so far is “The McGrewchebags”.

If all goes well, I will be posting scores and commentary as the competition carries on through the weekend.

If you are a student in the class, here’s a free flag: ff8551ef39