PACTF

Computer security competition

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|

PACTF

Screenshot

PACTF Home Page 04-AUG-2016

Type of site

| Competition
Available in| English
Owner| Phillips Academy Techmasters[1]
Created by|

* Yatharth Agarwal
* Tony Tan
* Cameron Wong[2]

URL| www.pactf.com
Commercial| No
Registration| Required
Launched| November 12, 2015; 9 years ago (2015-11-12)[3]
Current status| Archived
Written in| Python[4]
2016 PACTF Organizers

PACTF was an annual web-based computer security Capture the Flag (CTF) competition for middle and high school students.[2] It was founded by a group of students at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.[5] The competition's sponsors include the Abbot Academy Association at Phillips Academy; the Information Networking Institute and CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University; the Hariri Institute for Computing, Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) project, and Modular Approach to Cloud Security (MACS) project at Boston University; and other entities.[6][7]

This competition follows the Jeopardy CTF format,[8] where teams “hack, decrypt, reverse, and do whatever it takes to solve increasingly challenging security puzzles."[9] Once a team successfully determines the security vulnerability purposefully left in the problem material and executes an attack, they can obtain an answer string called a "flag." By submitting the correct flag, teams can receive feedback and points that improve their ranking.[10]

In April 2016, more than 1000 teams from the United States and other countries participated in the competition.[2] The second and third PACTF competitions took place in the Spring of 2017 and 2018 at similar scales.[11][12][13] The fourth PACTF competition took place in May 2019.[14]

## References

[edit]

1. ^ "About PACTF". www.pactf.com. PACTF. Retrieved 2016-08-04.
2. ^ a b c Tkacik, Daniel (2016-06-08). "Thanks to CyLab's picoCTF, the Phillips Academy celebrates its own successful hacking contest - Carnegie Mellon University CyLab". www.cylab.cmu.edu. Carnegie Mellon University CyLab Security and Privacy Institute. Retrieved 2016-08-03.
3. ^ "Current Year Grants - Abbot Academy Association". www.andover.edu. Phillips Academy. Archived from the original on 2016-08-04. Retrieved 2016-08-04.
4. ^ "PACTF Source Code". GitHub. Retrieved 2016-08-04.
5. ^ Ramos, JP; Tolo, Larson (2016-05-03). "P.A.C.T.F. Competition Hopes To Educate Students in Computer Security". The Phillipian. Retrieved 2016-08-03.
6. ^ "INI and CyLab sponsor high school's first hacking contest". www.ini.cmu.edu. Archived from the original on 2016-08-04. Retrieved 2016-08-03.
7. ^ "Sponsors". PACTF. Retrieved 2016-08-03.
8. ^ "CTFtime ctf-wtf". www.ctftime.org/ctf-wtf.
9. ^ "PACTF". www.pactf.com. PACTF. Retrieved 2016-08-04.
10. ^ "Institute, MACS, and MOC Co-Sponsor Online Computer Security Competition » Rafik Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering | Blog Archive | Boston University". www.bu.edu. Boston University. 2016-06-23. Retrieved 2016-08-03.
11. ^ Chang, Tiffany; Cordova-Potter, Zar (2017-04-30). "PACTF Attracts Thousands of Hacking Afficionados [sic] Worldwide". The Phillipian. Retrieved 2019-04-15.
12. ^ Hong, Alex (2018-05-26). "PACTF 2018 Writeup: AI". Medium. Retrieved 2019-04-15.
13. ^ "Phillips Academy Capture the Flag (PACTF) Launches Third Annual Computer Science Competition" (PDF). The Phillipian. 2018-04-20. p. 6. Retrieved 2019-04-15.
14. ^ PACTF. "PACTF". 2019.pactf.com. Retrieved 2019-04-15.