Ask Slashdot: Capture the Flag Training

An anonymous reader writes "I'm a computer science professor and a group of students want me to help them train for a capture the flag competition. I am interested in this and I'm familiar with security in general, but I've never been involved in one of these competitions. Does anyone know of any resources which would be useful to train for this?"

Comments

Re:CTF?

[exomondo]

Oh nevermind, I assume you mean the DefCon style one, difficult to know when there's no link to anything.

The obvious

[penguinoid]

Get as much information about the playing field as possible, and also the opponent robots. Study multiple strategies, and play them against each other. The optimum would identify the enemy's strategy and play the one strongest against that, but you may be unable to reliably identify it. When choosing a strategy, consider the rules and whether it is better to score as many flags as possible, or win as many games as possible.

Re:CTF?

[EvanED]

I went straight there... but a year ago I hadn't heard of hacker-style CTF, and I would expect many other visitors haven't either. The comments bear either that or 'everyone is a troll' out.

Re:Not a good idea

[Half-pint HAL]

Sorry, but your stereotype is out of date.

There are no computer science students, because the industry only wants trained monkeys rather than people who can do new and clever things, and demand that computer science courses are replaced with programming ones.