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Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

kabir.au

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Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#361

Post by wslh »

jaybrendansmith wrote: post #205
baq wrote: post #44

Replace ‘CTF’ with ‘high school’ or ‘university’ and you’ve described the total slow motion collapse of education; the only saving grace is that most of it requires in person presence. We’ve figured out the human replacement pipeline it seems, but we haven’t figured out the eduction part. LLMs can be wonderful teachers, but the temptation to just tell it ‘do it for me’ is almost impossible to resist.

Everything we've learned in the last 10 years is telling us that computers do not help human education in the slightest. We remember better when we write with pen and paper. We learn better with whiteboards and paper books. The simple answer: Remove most computing from education entirely. Blue composition books, pencils, whiteboards is what trains humans. Calculators are helpful perhaps but it is quite possible that…

I would start saying that many people need presence in a real environment with people to learn. We don't use all our senses in a remote environment.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#362

Post by gmm1990 »

hemlock4593 wrote: post #285

I feel the post. For me AI has ruined both, playing CTFs and also building CTFs challenges. The most annoying thing to me is the "yeah idk but here is the flag" mentality. Before when playing CTFs with my mates was usually sitting there for hours tackling a challenge until some other mate joined, had some look together and solved it with you together in 30 minutes which is the most rewarding learning experience. Nowa…

I don’t know like chess engines didn’t kill chess. You could just play with people that don’t use the “engine”

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#363

Post by razster »

bawolff wrote: post #297
Nifty3929 wrote: post #296

Must I beg to have an acronym spelled out a least once, the first time it's used? Even if you assume 90% of readers already know, the other 10% (including me, in this case) will thank you, it doesn't take much effort, and it expands the reach of your communication or idea. Exceptions for cases where the acronym is just so well known that a lot of people don't even know what it stands for even though they know the con…

Which acronym do you mean? CTF? I think that acronym, just like BGP, is more well known by itself than what it stands for. More generally, not every piece of writing is meant for every audience. Like if someone writes a blog post about CTFs aimed at people who like CTFs, nobody in the target audience needs to have CTF explained to them. Ultimately HN is a link aggregator, but sometimes its a bit like eavesdropping on…

What I see CTF I think Capture The Flag, Tribe player in me.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#364

Post by george916a »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #296

Must I beg to have an acronym spelled out a least once, the first time it's used? Even if you assume 90% of readers already know, the other 10% (including me, in this case) will thank you, it doesn't take much effort, and it expands the reach of your communication or idea. Exceptions for cases where the acronym is just so well known that a lot of people don't even know what it stands for even though they know the con…

[dead]

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#365

Post by lelandbatey »

razster wrote: post #363
bawolff wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which acronym do you mean? CTF? I think that acronym, just like BGP, is more well known by itself than what it stands for. More generally, not every piece of writing is meant for every audience. Like if someone writes a blog post about CTFs aimed at people who like CTFs, nobody in the target audience needs to have CTF explained to them. Ultimately HN is a link aggregator, but sometimes its a bit like eavesdropping on…

What I see CTF I think Capture The Flag, Tribe player in me.

CTF stands for "Capture The Flag" in the parent article. Just the security competition kind, not the FPS game kind.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#366

Post by viccis »

mort96 wrote: post #26
amingilani wrote: post #22

I don’t think CTFs are dead, they’ll just evolve. The difficulty level will need to be increased or the rules locked down. Just like sports and racing persist despite the existence of performance enhancing drugs and rocket technology. I just did a CTF where I was in the top 10. It was the first CTF I completed and I used AI because the rules permitted it. That said, I couldn’t solve all challenges. But yes, it was si…

Increasing the difficulty level is a terrible solution. The problem with CTFs isn't that they're too easy. Making them harder just makes them even less accessible to people who don't cheat. It'd be like seeing people who put hidden electric motors in their bikes during Tour de France and conclude, "oh we just need longer distances and steeper hills".

Exactly. The whole point of CTFs is that you could start on a simple one (CSAW was usually my go to one to recommend) as a complete novice who'd never done a second of computer security work and, after a few days of 8+ hours of running into concepts you hadn't encountered, googling, reading tutorial, practicing, overcoming the challenges to get a flag, etc., you'd come out the other end knowing a solid bit of security practitioner basics and likely whether you'd like to continue. Then you could keep going upwards and onwards. I went from 0 knowledge to a nice job in the field in a year.

Raising the difficulty only matters for the (imo) less important part: the dick measuring competition between the very top teams.

The actual point of CTFs was usually to keep your skills sharp and stay learning. Eventually you build your own challenges, thereby completing the "have it taught to me, then do it myself, then teach another person" three step process towards mastering concepts.

You can just say "let the people who want to learn from it do so" but honestly the entire culture of learning in the US at least is DEAD. We turned "education" into a rote system of maximizing incentives to the extent that that's all the youth know it as, and (increasingly) all educators can do. It's just gone without some kind of major reckoning, and we all know things will just collapse before that happens. The ball is in the court of whatever country can learn how to force its youth to learn the real way and use AI productively only AFTER learning the concepts it's being used to accelerate.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#367

Post by AndrewKemendo »

baq wrote: post #44

Replace ‘CTF’ with ‘high school’ or ‘university’ and you’ve described the total slow motion collapse of education; the only saving grace is that most of it requires in person presence. We’ve figured out the human replacement pipeline it seems, but we haven’t figured out the eduction part. LLMs can be wonderful teachers, but the temptation to just tell it ‘do it for me’ is almost impossible to resist.

I started teaching “how to build quality products using LLMs” full time recently, and most of what I teach is literally just the 101s of systems engineering, reliabily engineering, product development and project management:

Exceptional clarity on the problem you have

Know how to measure the problem you’re solving

Numerically define what “done” is

Make a deterministic and fully observable prototype

Iterate in production with the user

Expand user base as desired with user iteration in parallel forever

Etc…

Obviously a lot more in the details and these are all case by case, but these chatbots are basically perfect productivity machines for this process.

The massive caveat to all of this is this only works for people that can reliably and truthfully define those items above, are willing to structure organization to make those your priorities.

And actually most financial incentives demand the opposite of this process

If most organizations were honest about it, they would simply say “we’re here to make the most money possible and we’re gonna do whatever it takes to do that”

A lot of people don’t like that, so they don’t say it to come up with other bullshit.

Ultimately that’s why I felt like my only option right now is to teach people how to do this because I assumed it was obvious and it is not.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#368

Post by ajnin »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #296

Must I beg to have an acronym spelled out a least once, the first time it's used? Even if you assume 90% of readers already know, the other 10% (including me, in this case) will thank you, it doesn't take much effort, and it expands the reach of your communication or idea. Exceptions for cases where the acronym is just so well known that a lot of people don't even know what it stands for even though they know the con…

Your two paragraphs are completely contradictory. I agree with the first one.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#369

Post by acters »

mort96 wrote: post #26
amingilani wrote: post #22

I don’t think CTFs are dead, they’ll just evolve. The difficulty level will need to be increased or the rules locked down. Just like sports and racing persist despite the existence of performance enhancing drugs and rocket technology. I just did a CTF where I was in the top 10. It was the first CTF I completed and I used AI because the rules permitted it. That said, I couldn’t solve all challenges. But yes, it was si…

Increasing the difficulty level is a terrible solution. The problem with CTFs isn't that they're too easy. Making them harder just makes them even less accessible to people who don't cheat. It'd be like seeing people who put hidden electric motors in their bikes during Tour de France and conclude, "oh we just need longer distances and steeper hills".

When ctf organizers attempt to make a challenge "harder", I find they push the challenge into a more "guessy" state. Instead of proving skill, you basically need to guess some obscure or random step in the puzzle that the challenge is meant to give you. It is one of the most common problems with any puzzle based challenge system.
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