Shaping STEM

Education

Competition

Student Growth

What's a CTF?

CTF (“Capture-The-Flag”):

A cybersecurity competition where participants:

Solve challenges and earn points.
Simulate real-world cybersecurity scenarios.
Test skills in areas like penetration testing, reverse engineering, AI and cryptography.

CTFs are a fun and educational way to learn and practice cybersecurity skills, network with others, and boost career prospects.

May consist of software or physical challenges involving coding, robotics, and even drones.

The Polygon Labs Goal for CTFs

CTFs are a pillar of the cyber community that welcomes incoming talent, while exercising established talent.

We take these games to the next level.

We recognize opportunities exist beyond the 24 hour event format to engage with and elevate the community at large.

Our services create and support each aspect of the CTF from custom design, development, and administration to mentoring and connecting talent with opportunities outside of the game for participants at ANY skill level.

Working with Polygon Labs

Polygon Labs is excited for every opportunity to challenge and teach students.

We have experience in the all aspects of designing and conducting CTFs, hosting workshops, mentoring, and engaging the community. We are excited to bring this passion to the eCTF community.

No CTF events are the same. Work offerings included in this document assume 2-3 day CTF events but are flexible to meet the format and skill level of any CTF.

What We Offer

Design

We have plenty of experience developing various custom events from simulated attacking bio-pharmaceutical labs, to hands-on robotics to navigate mazes autonomously.

Develop

We recognize that CTFs are at their core a morale game and approach design and development such that participants love playing and finish our games. The longer participants play the greater they learn. Our goal is for students to complete our CTFs and leave knowing how to approach industry problems.

Administer

Administering CTFs is also its own challenge. Events commonly include hundreds of participants. We offer services to ensure the CTF runs smoothly from infrastructure administration, technical support for participants, and general staff augmentation.

Support

We can support existing CTFs in various ways: offering technical guidance to participants at the event, augmenting existing staff for development or administration, and even augmentation of existing challenge sets or infrastructure.

Challenge Reviews,

Code Reviews,

Adjudication

A CTF event is the sum of its challenges. Successful events result when challenges behave as expected. We offer services to analyze the success of a CTF event itself and provide feedback on the challenges. We have extensive experience working with high school and college students and can provide feedback to customize challenge difficulty.

Each challenge is unique, especially challenges that require participants to submit custom solutions. We offer services to help review and adjudicate user solutions as they are submitted.

Events where participants build challenges directly necessitates the challenge be reviewed. We offer services to work with participants to ensure their challenges operate, are fair, and fit into the event format.

Workshops and Tutorials

Workshops

CTF events are commonly 24-48 hour sprints. However, we see the opportunity to connect with participants beyond these sprints. We supplement CTF events with in person and online workshops to elevate the competition, providing training material that teaches methodologies and skills to solve CTF and industry challenges.

We offer pre-event workshops to train participants ahead of time and expose them to the necessary skill sets.

We offer post-event workshops to solidify skills exercised during the CTF and connect lessons learned to relevant industry problem sets.

Our workshops teach relevant skill sets such as software development, reverse engineering, and exploitation to ensure competitiveness when recruiting cyber security or programming talent.

Tutorials

We primarily test a participant’s skill set. No group’s skill sets are evenly distributed. We offer tutorials to democratize and elevate participant skills to make engaging in the event a more positive experience for everyone. Tutorials are 2 hour long “tech talk” style engagements to expose participants to CTF or industry relevant skills, thus preparing them for success in a CTF and beyond.

We offer remote tutorials pre/post event to aid participants for any event. Tutorials for post events expose participants to unsolved challenges, review industry relevant challenges, as well as teach various methodologies to solve the challenges. No one wants to leave a CTF with questions.

Community Engagement

The CTF community is thriving and growing. We offer services to engage with participants in online communities to answer questions, propose techniques, and assist with solutions. We extend this for the CTF event and beyond to include assistance relevant to computing in general.

We offer:

Technical guidance
Career mentorship
Networking opportunities

CTF events challenge and teach, but community engagement solves industry problems.

Developmental Kits

CTFs often utilize various interesting pieces of hardware. We offer services to assemble and deliver developmental toolkits aimed to provide project-level challenges over a longer duration, as well as to give teachable projects for teachers and professors looking to augment their curriculum.

We offer:

Course guidance workbook for leaders
Curriculum augmentation
Test and quiz questions
All materials, software, and coursework needed to fully build and test project

CTF events challenge and teach, and now you can make them a part of semester long lesson planning.

You could build this...

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