State-of-the-Art: Security Competition in Talent Education

Abstract

Security competitions have become increasingly popular events for recruitment, training, evaluation, and recreation in the field of computer security. And among these various exercises, Capture the flag (CTF) competitions have the widest audience. Participants in CTF of Jeopardy style focus on solving several specific challenges independently while participants in CTF of attack-defense mode concentrate on vulnerable service maintenance and vulnerability exploitation on an end-target box. However, according to a report published by TREND MICRO Corporation, there are six stages of a typical Targeted Attack: (1) Intelligence Gathering (2) Point of Entry (3) Command and Control Communication (4) Lateral Movement (5) Asset Discovery and (6) Data Exfiltration. Further, Lateral Movement is the key stage where threat actors move deeper into the network. Because of the lack of large-scale complex network environment, CTF cannot simulate a complete network penetration of the six stages, especially the Lateral Movement. It is indispensable to perform the Lateral Movement the skill of Network Exploring which is not included by security competitions at present. So we create Explore-Exploit which is an attack-defense mode competition that models the network penetration scenario, and promotes the participant’s skill of Network Exploring. This paper is trying to convey a better methodology for teaching practical attack-defense techniques to participants through an alternative to CTF.

This paper was supported by the Key Laboratory of Network Evaluation Technology of China Academy of Sciences, and Beijing Key Laboratory of Network Security Protection Technology. This paper was funded by the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission D161100001216001, Z161100002616032 project.