Cybersecurity Knowledge and Skills Taught in Capture the Flag Challenges
This study identifies a gap in cybersecurity education for students participating in CTF challenges, specifically the underrepresentation of non-technical skills crucial for addressing modern cyber threats.
This paper analyzed 15,963 textual solutions from Capture the Flag (CTF) challenges since 2012 to understand the cybersecurity knowledge and skills taught. The analysis revealed a prominence of technical knowledge like cryptography and network security, while human aspects such as social engineering and cybersecurity awareness were neglected.
Capture the Flag challenges are a popular form of cybersecurity education, where students solve hands-on tasks in an informal, game-like setting. The tasks feature diverse assignments, such as exploiting websites, cracking passwords, and breaching unsecured networks. However, it is unclear how the skills practiced by these challenges match formal cybersecurity curricula defined by security experts. We explain the significance of Capture the Flag challenges in cybersecurity training and analyze their 15,963 textual solutions collected since 2012. Based on keywords in the solutions, we map them to well-established ACM/IEEE curricular guidelines to understand which skills the challenges teach. We study the distribution of cybersecurity topics, their variance in different challenge formats, and their development over the past years. The analysis showed the prominence of technical knowledge about cryptography and network security, but human aspects, such as social engineering and cybersecurity awareness, are neglected. We discuss the implications of these results and relate them to contemporary literature. Our results indicate that future Capture the Flag challenges should include non-technical aspects to address the current advanced cyber threats and attract a broader audience to cybersecurity.