Git-based CTF: A Simple and Effective Approach to Organizing In-Course Attack-and-Defense Security Competition

Security competitions, a.k.a., CTFs, have never been easy to run for a classroom teacher despite there being considerable body of research on these events. It is often frustrating for teachers to organize and administer such an event as doing so requires significant time and human resource investments. Creating new problems for every CTF is challenging as there are many factors to consider while developing a CTF problem such as the difficulty level of each challenge. In this paper, we propose a simple, but effective approach that we refer to as Git-based CTF to hosting an in-class attack-and-defense CTF contest while minimizing the operational costs for teachers. We share our experience and lessons learned by organizing a Git-based CTF in KAIST.