Analysis and Exercises for Engaging Beginners in Online CTF Competitions for Security Education

Cybersecurity competitions are getting more attention as a prominent approach of computer security education in the past years. It is vital to look into better ways to engage beginners in the competitions to improve computer security education. This work collected and analyzed the solutions of about 3600 Capture The Flag (CTF) challenges from 160 security competitions in the past three years. This work identified the security issues that are the most concerning to industry and academia and enumerated the security tools and techniques that are used the most by players. Based on the analysis, this work presented a set of computer security exercises as a downloadable tool package for beginners to try out in an introductory computer security course.