Quals Wrapup

Greetings,

DEF CON 2016 CTF Qualifiers are officially over. Thanks to everybody who came by our IRC this weekend and played in our game. HUGE props to PPP, who solved every challenge available with just under 6 hours left in the game.

Source code to all of our challenges from this year is already up and posted on our github.

In addition to source code, the challenges, as they ran, are all available on Docker Hub. If you want to run a challenge from this year, it's as easy as `docker run -it legitbs/challengename`. Our docker hub page is https://hub.docker.com/r/legitbs.

In the coming days, we will be contacting the team captains of all the teams who qualified to confirm participation in finals. Please be on the look out for this email.

As a reminder: this year, DEF CON CTF Finals will be running on DECREE. We will be inviting the winning CRS from DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge to compete against our qualified humans to see if they can stave off the Rise of the Machines. Details of the finer details of our game are forthcoming, be on the lookout for that.

From all of us at Legitimate Business Syndicate, we thank you for letting us run your Capture The Flag. We hope everybody had a good time playing, and we look forward to seeing all of you at the Bally's Event Center in Las Vegas!

DEF CON CTF Qualifiers for 2016 Starting Soon

Hey, we're running online qualifiers for DEF CON CTF at midnight UTC (five hours from now), and you should play them.

Really Obvious Foreshadowing

Quals this year have a lot of references to DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge technologies. If you have no idea what that is, read our CGC for Hackers series of posts. If you do have an idea of what that is but are fuzzy on some of the details, read those posts, and maybe also tear into our collection of CGC technical documentation. If you get bamboozled by all of the above, perhaps keep our CGC Glossary handy too.

• vito goes back to the flag mines…

What is DECREE?

DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge uses a new computing environment, the DARPA Experimental Cyber Research Evaluation Environment, or DECREE. While DECREE is designed to be less useful for general-purpose computing, it has some properties that make it excellent for binary reverse engineering, patching, and exploitation contests.

DECREE is built on i386 Linux, and ships with the clang compiler and support for special CGC Executable Format (CGCEF) binaries that support a much smaller set of system calls. In addition, DECREE comes with tools for validating functionality of binaries with XML-based pollers, proving vulnerabilities with XML- or C-based Proofs-of-Vulnerability (PoVs), and, of course, tools to help you debug and analyze binaries.

How do I install DECREE?

The current DECREE version is a small network of Vagrant boxes, available from the CGC repo. You'll need Vagrant and VirtualBox installed to get them running.

  1. Install VirtualBox from https://www.virtualbox.org
  2. Install Vagrant from https://www.vagrantup.com
  3. Download the Vagrantfile from http://repo.cybergrandchallenge.com/boxes/
  4. Put the Vagrantfile in a parent directory to where you’ll be keeping your DECREE files. For example:
    decree
        ├── Vagrantfile
        ├── example1
        │   ├── Makefile
        │   ├── lib
        │   ├── pov
        │   └── src
        └── example2
            ├── Makefile
            └── …
  5. Run vagrant up crs to download, start, and set up the image for cyber reasoning systems. This may take a while, so read about Vagrant at https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/getting-started/up.html while it works.
  6. Run vagrant ssh crs to ssh in to the image.
  7. The path with the Vagrantfile is at /vagrant, so cd /vagrant/example1
  8. Run make to build and test your CGC binary.

What is a CGC binary and how do I get one?

The crs Vagrant machine has challenge binaries in the /usr/share/cgc-sample/challenges directory.

Outside of the crs image, you can get samples at https://github.com/cybergrandchallenge/samples. The complete set of CGC Qualifying Event (CQE) challenge sets are there, as well as some example CGC Final Event (CFE) challenges in the “examples” directory.

What can I do and not do in a CGC binary?

CGC binaries are designed to be idempotent, like a pure mathematical function. Given the same initial conditions and inputs, the same binary should produce the same outputs, with the same instruction stream and same memory accesses every time. You can build analysis tools for CGC binaries; that’s what they're there for.

On the other hand, CGC binaries cannot manipulate, create, or even open files. Such is the price of idempotency.

CGC binaries can communicate over file descriptors, but depend on the CGC evaluation tooling to open them.

CGC binaries can be debugged with the version of gdb included in the DECREE VM.

Give it a shot!

We had two DECREE-based challenges in our 2015 qualifiers: cybergrandsandbox and patcher. As announced during the 2015 DEF CON closing ceremonies, the winning computer from CGC will be competing in our 2016 finals game. Knowing how to work with DECREE will probably be a valuable skill for quals and finals this year.

Quick Quals Qupdate

The DEF CON CTF 2016 qualifying contests are going very well. Here's where we are:

Contest Dates Notes
DEF CON CTF 2015 May 16 - Aug. 9 2015 Qualified DEFKOR
HITCON CTF Oct. 17 - Dec. 6 2015 Qualified blue-lotus
RuCTFE Nov. 21, 2015 Qualified StratumAuhuur
SECCON CTF Dec. 5 2015 - Jan. 31 2016 First place team already qualified
32C3 CTF Dec. 27 - 29 2015 Qualified pasten
Boston Key Party Mar. 4 - 6 2016 Qualified HITCON
PlaidCTF Apr. 15 - 17, 2016 Qualified LC↯BC
0CTF Mar. 12 - Apr. 24, 2016 First place team already qualified
DEF CON CTF 2016 Qualifiers May 21 - 23, 2016 Online Jeopardy style, qualifying eight teams
DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge Aug. 4, 2016 All-machine competition, on-site in Las Vegas

About SECCON CTF and 0CTF

We made the difficult decision to not accept any qualifying teams from these contests. While both contests went spectacularly well, the first-place teams from both contests were already qualified for DEF CON CTF Finals. Since both games had very few teams in their finals slate, and scores dropped off so sharply after first place, we've decided to not accept second or third place teams from these events.

Legitimate Business Syndicate has nothing but the complete and utmost respect for the SECCON CTF and 0CTF organizers: we know exactly how hard it is to run CTF games, and score them fairly. We hope to promote and work with them again in the future.

Quals are Coming

DEF CON CTF Qualifiers start on May 21, at the stroke of Midnight UTC, and run for 48 hours. We are planning on having a "Baby's First" category of approachable problems for hackers of all skill levels, and the usual slate of harder challenges that'll make you sweat, cry, and binge-drink your hacking beverages of choice.

Register today, or any time during the game.

Cyber Grand Challenge

We're excited to see what happens with the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge Final Event at DEF CON. If you're interested in learning more about it, check out our CGC For Hackers series, that we will be adding to on the road to Vegas.

What is the Cyber Grand Challenge?

DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge is “a competition that seeks to create automatic defensive systems capable of reasoning about flaws, formulating patches and deploying them on a network in real time.” More laconically, it’s Capture The Flag for autonomous computers.

Just like DEF CON Capture The Flag (CTF), Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) is a contest with two separate events. The CGC Qualifying Event (CQE) was held on June 3, 2015, and the CGC Finals Event (CFE) will be held on August 4, 2016, at DEF CON. Unlike DEF CON CTF, the competitors are Cyber Reasoning Systems (CRSes) that compete autonomously.

CQE had 28 teams participate, finding flaws in more than 99 of the 131 binaries during the twenty-four hour event. In addition to finding flaws, competitors patched binaries to remove vulnerabilities. Patches were graded on time, memory usage, and space efficiency. Competitors only had access to organizer-provided binaries, making this similar to a Jeopardy-style CTF, where competitors only have access to organizer-provided challenges.

Seven teams from CQE will be competing in the CFE in August. The scope and complexity is much bigger. Similar to an attack-defense CTF, organizer-provided binaries are just the beginning. CRSes will be expected to process binaries submitted by other competitors, in a complex “consensus evaluation” process that we’ll detail in another post.

The Cyber Grand Challenge is serious business. Not only does the top team win two million dollars, but every competing team will have pushed the limits of automated binary analysis and patching. In addition, the consensus evaluation format is a massive new development for the CTF community as a whole, and the popularization of CRSes for CTF competition will drastically change how CTF games are played.

Official CGC Links

Unofficial CGC Links