iCTF: the International Capture The Flag Competition

The International Capture The Flag (“iCTF”) is a distributed, wide-area security exercise, which aims to test the security skills of the participants. The iCTF is one of the world’s largest and longest-running educational hacking competitions and has the goal of educating students about security-related topics in a live setting.
iCTF 2024

The iCTF 2024 will take place from November 16, 2024, at 10 am Pacific Time to November 22, 2024, at 4pm Pacific Time.

There are two separate competitions: a competition dedicated to high school teams (hiCTF) and a competition for college undergraduate students (uniCTF). Both competitions will be challenge-based and will use the CTFd as the platform.

Starting on August 19, we will make available the challenges from the 2023 edition of the iCTF through a CTFd instance, to help in preparation and training.

In addition, we are publishing training content focused on high school teams, so that they can better prepare for the competition.

In the meanwhile, if you are interested in participating, please assemble a team! The only things you need are:

- One or more persons
- A cool name
- A team advisor who has to be a teacher or a professor. No exception. The advisor is responsible for the ethical behavior of the team, and will be contacted in order to verify the legitimacy of the team.

You can register your team using this registration form.

You can watch an introductory presentation.

Join the iCTF discord channel, which contains pointers to training materials.

You can watch iCTF-related presentation in the iCTF YouTube playlist.

The 2024 iCTF is sponsored by the ACTION NSF AI Institute, and was organized by Shellphish and the UCSB Women in Computer Science group.

The high-school competition provides the following prizes:

1st Place: 3000$
2nd Place: 2000$
3rd Place: 1000$

To be eligible, teams must be verified high-school teams from within the continental United States.

The team must have a team advisor who has to be a teacher or a professor. No exception. The advisor is responsible for the ethical behavior of the team, and will be contacted in order to verify the legitimacy of the team.