Toward a Fine-Grained Evaluation of the Pwnable CTF

Abstract

In the untacted era of the recent COVID-19 virus outbreak, the pedagogic value of Capture the Flag (CTF) has grown even more as an effective means for students to learn knowledge about the overall computer system and information security through active participation without facing the teacher. However, in the process of successfully introducing CTF into the classroom, educators may suffer a high burden due to factors such as time and economy in the process of crafting problems and operating CTFs. Accordingly, various studies have been conducted to reduce this burden. On the other hand, in introducing CTF to the classroom, the burden of educators also exists in the aspect of an in-depth evaluation of students’ academic achievement. This means that educators need to evaluate students’ academic abilities in-depth so that educators can provide clear feedback on the factors that caused students to fail. Through this, educators can effectively increase student learning efficiency by helping students correct their own weaknesses. The need for such detailed evaluation can be said to be quite high in the pwnable field, one of the representative fields of CTF. This is because pwnable requires participants to have a comprehensive understanding of overall program analysis, vulnerability, mitigation bypassing techniques, systems, and so on. However, the evaluation manner of the existing CTF is not suitable for an in-depth evaluation of students’ academic ability because they simply measure whether or not they solve problems in a pass and/or non-pass manner. Therefore, we designed a fine-grained evaluation CTF platform that aims to help educators provide precise evaluation and feedback on learners’ failure factors in an attempt by educators to introduce CTF into the classroom to educate pwnable to reduce the burden on educators in properly evaluating student’s Academic achievement.

Supported by the Institute for Information Communications Technology Promotion (IITP) of the Korea government (MSIT) [Grant No. 2018-0-00420, 2019-0-00273].