✨Misc Terms & Rules

Misc Terms in CTFs

• Full-clear: In Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions, a "full-clear" refers to the achievement of solving all the challenges in a particular category or the entire event. This is a testament to the participant's comprehensive skills and thorough understanding of the subject matter.

• First-blood: This term is commonly used in CTFs to denote the first successful solution or exploit submitted for a particular challenge. Achieving "first-blood" is often considered prestigious as it demonstrates a participant's skill, speed, and problem-solving prowess in a competitive environment.

• Waves of Challenges: In Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions, "waves of challenges" refer to a structured release of multiple problems or tasks over the course of the event. This format allows participants to tackle a variety of challenges incrementally, often increasing in difficulty, and can help maintain a steady pace and engagement throughout the competition.

• CTF Writeup: A CTF writeup is a detailed explanation or report created by participants after solving a challenge in a Capture the Flag event. It typically includes the thought process, methodologies, tools used, and steps undertaken to arrive at the solution. Writeups serve as educational resources for the community, allowing others to learn from different approaches and techniques used to tackle the challenges.

CTFs Utilize Discord

Discord is used often during competitive play to interact with the organizers of the event, ask for hints, find teammates, and raise any tickets if you suspect any problems with the challenges.

Discord Rules: (an example from PatriotCTF 2024)

1. Be respectful. No racism, sexism, or harassment of other participants will be tolerated.

2. No inappropriate, unsafe content, or spam.

By using this server, you agree to these rules. Ticket Use

1. To make a new ticket, please go to the ⁠open-tickets channel. There click the button that says Open a ticket!.

2. You will then be asked to fill out a form that asks whether your issue is a platform or challenge issue, and description of said issue.

3. If your issue is with a specific challenge, make sure you state the challenge name in the form.

4. Once your ticket has been created, please be patient! Execs / Challenge Authors will respond to your ticket as soon as possible.

5. Avoid creating spam tickets or duplicate tickets. Doing so may result in removal from the ability to create tickets / use the discord.

Please do some minimal due diligence on your issue before creating a ticket

Common CTF Rules

CTF Rules: (an example from PatriotCTF 2024)

1. Teams may have as many members as they want. Prizes will be sent to the team captain to be distributed as they see fit.

2. Only student teams are eligible for student prizes. If your team is playing as a student team, all members of your team must be enrolled at a secondary or postsecondary institution such as a high school, college, or university, cannot be a citizen of a country sanctioned by the U.S., and cannot have helped create this CTF. If your team satisfies these eligibility requirements, please checkmark the box that states "Student Team" when creating your team.

3. If an eligible student team wins a prize, then the CTF organizers will contact the team and ask them to provide proof that each team member is a student at an educational institution before the prizes are given.

4. You are not allowed to receive help from people who are not a part of your team (online resources are permitted).

5. You are only permitted to play for one team, playing for multiple teams, flag sharing, or otherwise attempting to gain an unfair advantage over other teams is not permitted.

6. You are not allowed to attack the CTF infrastructure or anything used to host the CTF unless a challenge specifies otherwise. If you identify a security vulnerability within the CTF infrastructure that has nothing to do with a challenge, then please contact @Exec with details.

7. The purpose of this competition is to teach students cybersecurity and ethical hacking. Please do not use any of the knowledge that you gain from this competition to conduct illegal activities. If you decide to do so anyways, then we are not responsible for your actions.

8. Breaking any of these rules will result in removal from the scoreboards and an automatic disqualification from prize eligibility

9. Please contact @Exec if there are any issues.