CTF-W Workshop, Co-located with ITASEC25

Welcome to the Capture the Flag for Work (CTF-W) workshop webpage, which hosts all the info and news needed for the workshop.

Important Dates

• December 27, 2024: Deadline for Workshop Paper Submission
• January 12, 2025: Author Notification
• February 3-8, 2025: Conference (CTF-W workshop day yet to be decided)
• February 20, 2025: Camera-ready deadline

Workshop Abstract

Capture the Flags (CTFs) are cybersecurity competitions where participants must find a specific secret (flag) by solving problems (often referred to as challenges) that can simulate, simplify, or reproduce real-world security issues, which must be addressed by security tools and techniques widely adopted in industry and research. The flag has a specific format according to the competition and, most of the time, is meaningful and reflects the solution or the technique/tool used to solve it. Most of the time, what players learn from these competitions can be applied to real-world scenarios for bug bounty, academic research, or industry development.

This workshop motivates CTF participants (current and former) to present a proposal based on their experience, illustrating real-world cases (either from industry, research, or personal projects) on which they applied techniques learned during CTF competitions. We also invite people to present tools developed to solve specific challenges, such as automated exploits developed during jeopardies (which could be used, e.g., for bug bounty, security monitoring, vulnerability detection and exploitation) or tools developed for attack and defense competitions that companies could use in their every-day defense (such as network traffic monitoring, WAFs, firewalls, automated attack detection methodologies).

We accept works based on various CTF categories, such as web and network security, cryptography, reverse engineering, binary exploitation, digital forensics, and Artificial Intelligence security. This workshop aims to foster the importance of CTFs in training cybersecurity experts, particularly focusing on the development of new techniques both in offensive and defensive security, underlining how they can help problem-solving and behavioral aspects such as mental stress management.

We encourage submissions where senior players (e.g., the ones who played in ECSC, ICC, DEFCON, and other top-tier competitions) describe the role of CTFs in their working experiences by also describing how they helped them in their job interviews and their daily industrial tasks. We also encourage CTF organizers to submit proposals that describe how they create events and how devising specific challenges can help and influence real-world scenarios, illustrating a connection between the two worlds.

Workshop Organization

Workshop Organizers:

Contact:

For any question, or info, please contact Davide Maiorca at: davide.maiorca@unica.it or Silvia Lucia Sanna at: silvial.sanna@unica.it