As you all know by now, PPP recently hosted its own CTF competition called PlaidCTF. This was a great chance for our team to take all the problems we wished we found in other competitions and force other people to solve them. We had an awesome time putting problems together for people to solve, and we’d like to think it turned out pretty well.

The competition started a little behind schedule, and we had a few hiccups during the competition. In the end, however, all but one problem (which was removed due to oversights on our part) had been pwned by at least one team, and over 400 teams had signed up to play. We tried to make our problems different from what we’ve seen in past CTF’s, and we hope that everyone who took the time to solve them learned a lot in the process.

During the 48 hour competition, we were saddened to find ourselves just as busy as when we participate in competitions ourselves. Most of the 48 hour competition was spent keeping our servers running and answering questions on IRC, with perhaps an hour here and there for sleep.

Although running our own competition was incredibly stressful, it was also a lot of fun. We ended up learning a few new techniques as players solved problems differently than we planned and we also had many stressful moments watching as teams submitted keys they had mistyped by just a few characters.

Of course, the most important part of any competition is the winners! Although all the teams did a great job, especially considering our scheduling conflict with a major holiday, Hacking for Soju, C.o.P, and SSH came out on top, winning first, second, and third place, respectively. Final scores for all teams are available here.

More information, including writeups from the top teams, can be found here.

We would also appreciate feedback and ways to improve pCTF. We plan to hold the competition again next year, and we want to make it as awesome as possible, which means we need suggestions from you on how we could make it better.

Thanks for playing, and we hope to see you next year!