Optimal Attacks for the iCTF game
Kyriakos G. Vamvoudakis, João P. Hespanha · 2012
Security competitions are strong motivations for students to find novel security solutions. In this technical report we propose a mechanism for optimally allocating resources through the ten services of the competition 2011 international Capture The Flag (iCTF) in order to maximize the total number of points at the end of the competition. Our proposed mechanism is interpreted as a convex optimization problem. Two different optimization approaches are being considered, the first one considers that the data of the competition is known a priori and the second one uses a moving horizon scheme to make predictions of when to attack by using the history of existing data. We simulate the behavior of our proposed optimization schemes and compare them with what the teams actually did during the actual competition. 1 Background and Overview The iCTF [2] is a distributed wide-area security exercise whose goal is to test the security skills of the participants. The iCTF contest is organized by Prof. Giovanni Vigna of the Department of Computer Science at UCSB and is held once a year. The Capture the Flag contest is a multi-site, multi-team hacking contest in which a number of teams compete independently against each other.