Learning Obstacles in the Capture The Flag Model

Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions have been used in the computer security community for education and evaluation objectives for over a decade. These competitions are often regarded as excellent approaches to learn deeply technical concepts in a fun, non-traditional learning environment, but there are many difficulties associated with developing and competing in a CTF event that are rarely discussed that counteract these benefits. CTF competitions often have issues related to participation, quality assurance, and confusing challenges. These problems affect the overall quality of a CTF competition and describe how effective they are at catalyzing learning and assessing skill. In this paper, we present insights and lessons learned from organizing CSAW CTF, one of the largest and most successful CTFs.