Capturing Capture the Flag: Further Discussions

;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution

For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.

Since USENIX became an open access publisher of papers in 2008, ;login: has remained our only content behind a membership paywall. In keeping with our commitment to open access, all ;login: content will be open to everyone when we make this change. However, only USENIX members at the sustainer level or higher, as well as student members, will have exclusive access to the interactivity options. Rik Farrow, the current editor of the magazine, will continue to provide leadership for the overall content offered in ;login:, which will be released via our website on a regular basis throughout the year.

As we plan to launch this new format, we are forming an editorial committee of volunteers from throughout the USENIX community to curate content, meaning that this will be a formally peer-reviewed publication. This new model will increase opportunities for the community to contribute to ;login: and engage with its content. In addition to written articles, we are open to other ideas of what you might want to experience.

This year, the first USENIX Summit on Gaming, Games, and Gamification in Security Education (3GSE) was held, co-located with USENIX Security ’14. The summit challenged designers, organizers, gamers, and educators to consider how we assess and improve the current state of security games, both in and out of the classroom.

3GSE featured a panel devoted to capture the flag (CTF) competitions and their use in education, bringing together a diverse group of stakeholders interested in how we both run and evaluate those games. The discussion expressed a fascinating mix of hacker values, student-centric learning approaches, and technical issues inherent to running these complex competitions. I had the opportunity to follow up with our panelists—Peter Chapman, Andrew Davis, Chris Eagle, Portia Pusey, and Giovanni Vigna—to reflect on the highlights of that discussion.

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Capturing Capture the Flag: Further Discussions

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SECURITY