Capture The Flag - Rules

This is a set of rules for the CTF competition. It is not possible/feasible to list all the rules and the exceptions to rules that apply. When deciding if an attack/protection technique is fair or not, try to think about the fact that the goal of this exercise in not to determine who is 1337 and who is l4m3r, but, instead, to learn about protecting/attacking a system in a live situation. Try not to focus on "breaking" the scoring system and instead concentrate on developing/deploying effective (and realistic) defense and attack techniques.

Below, you'll find the current list of rules. These may change as more issues are raised by the participants.

• It is forbidden to launch denial-of-service (DOS) attacks. This is particularly critical, given the limited duration of the exercise. Please no floods, no DNS poisoning, no obviously destructive behavior.
• Excessive traffic generation will be penalized, regardless of the fact that the traffic is part of a DOS attack or not. Generating traffic from a host that a team has compromised to penalized the owner team is considered unfair practice. Please don't do it.
• It is possible to patch the services, provided that the patch is made available to the organizers by sending an email to ctf-admin@cs.ucsb.edu. This will allow the organizers to make sure that a patch will not block the scoring system, otherwise the service will be considered as non-functional.
• The scoring mechanism will access random pages at random times, in addition to checking for the flag values. Blocking access to the service functionality that is not associated with flag verification is equivalent to having the service not available.
• It is not possible to perform attacks outside the VPN. For example, attacking a site box using its routable address is not allowed. All the traffic for the CTF must be contained within the VPN.
• It is allowed to attack any host of a team's subnetwork. The attacks are not necessarily limited to the OS image. For example, if you compromise the OS image of Team 1 you may try to compromise the host that is running the VMware application.