The University of Alabama Capture the Flag Competition
The University of Alabama Capture the Flag Competition (UACTF) is sponsored by the University of Alabama’s Computer Science Department, Crimson Defense
Cyber Security Club, and the Digital Forensics and Control Systems Security Lab. UACTF will be a Jeopardy-style Capture the Flag Competition. There will be several categories to choose from with each category including easy, medium, and difficult challenges worth a varying amount of points. Hints will be available to help teams with solving the challenges, but these clues will cost the team points. The teams’ objective is to solve the challenges to score as many points as possible.
Although UACTF is in the style of a competition, this is a fun educational exercise. There are opportunities for students at all skill levels. Through UACTF, students will be provided with opportunities to collaborate, learn, and be exposed to a different way of thinking about cyber security. This will include thinking about possible careers in the cyber security field.
The material in this guide has been collected from several sources across the Internet. This guide will provide teams with a common starting point for preparing for UACTF and is not all inclusive of the challenges involved in UACTF. UACTF is not a hacking contest. Think of UACTF as more of a puzzle solving challenge with a cyber security theme. Below is a list of topics that might be seen during UACTF. This should not be considered a comprehensive list of the types of challenges that will be seen during the competition.
- Binary exploitation
- Code-breaking and decoding
- Cryptography
- Database security & SQL injection attacks
- Digital forensics
- Email analysis
- File analysis
- Network traffic analysis
- Programming
- Reverse engineering
- Social engineering
- Website security
The following provides additional information and links for some of the challenge types
to assist the students in preparing for UACTF 2021.
Code Breaking and Decoding
File Analysis
Network Traffic Analysis
Website Security
Reverse Engineering
Again, the above is not an all-inclusive list of topics for UACTF, but it is a good starting
point for teams. There is no right or wrong way to prepare for this event, and there are
many resources available on the Internet that can help. Below is a list of some such
resources that may be helpful in preparing your team for competition.
Potentially Helpful Websites:
- Learning Guides – https://picoctf.com/resources
- CTF Field Guide – https://trailofbits.github.io/ctf/
- Over the Wire – http://overthewire.org/wargames/
- Capture the Flag 101 – https://ctf101.org
- Collection of CTF info – https://github.com/apsdehal/awesome-ctf/blob/master/README.md
- List of practice sites – https://www.sjoerdlangkemper.nl/2018/12/19/practice-hacking-with-vulnerable-systems/
- uactf{tAkE_a_PeEk_InSiDe} - https://uacrimsondefense.github.io/