UCSB iCTF Results

Saturday, December 8. 2007
The 2007 UCSB International Capture The Flag contest finished a few minutes ago. The guys from the UCSB had organized an awesome contest with seven different services and many interesting challenges. The team from our lab had much fun and at the end, we scored second place - just the team from Milano (Chocolate Makers) beat us. Looking forward to next year's contest :-)

Info:
The UCSB International Capture The Flag (also known as the iCTF) is a distributed, wide-area security exercise, whose goal is to test the security skills of the participants from both the attack and defense viewpoints.

The Capture The Flag contest is a multi-site, multi-team hacking contest in which a number of teams compete independently against each other.

Each team is given a virtualized network installation (for example, a Linux host and/or a Windows host). The hosts provide a number of services. The services have a number of undisclosed vulnerabilities, which have been included in the servers' software by the contest organizers.

The goal of each team is to maintain the set of services available and uncompromised throughout the contest phase. Each team can (and should) attempt to compromise other teams' services. Since all the teams receive an identical copy of the virtual network, the task of each team is to find vulnerabilities in their copy of the hosts and possibly fix the vulnerabilities without disrupting the services. At the same time, the teams have to leverage their knowledge about the vulnerabilities they found to compromise the servers run by other teams. Compromising a service will allow a team to bypass the service's security mechanisms and to "capture the flag" associated with the service.

During the contest a scoring system keeps track, for each team, of which services are available, and which services have been compromised.

More info: http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~vigna/CTF/

Call for Paper: Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA'08)

Sunday, December 2. 2007
The Call for Papers for the 5th Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA'08) is available since a couple of days. Since I am a member of the program committee, I would love to see some submission from the readers of my blog.

About the conference:
The annual DIMVA conference serves as a premier forum for advancing the state of the art in intrusion detection, malware detection, and vulnerability assessment. Each year DIMVA brings together international experts from academia, industry and government to present and discuss novel research in these areas. DIMVA is organized by the special interest group Security - Intrusion Detection and Response of the German Informatics Society (GI). In 2008, the conference takes place July 10-11th, 2008 in Paris, France.

DIMVA solicits submission of high-quality, original scientific work. This year we invite two types of paper submissions:
  • Full papers, presenting novel and mature research results. Full papers are limited to 20 pages, prepared according to the instructions provided below. They will be reviewed by the program committee, and papers accepted for presentation at the conference will be included in the proceedings.

  • Short papers (extended abstracts), presenting original, still ongoing work that has not yet reached the maturity required for a full paper. Short papers are limited to 10 pages, prepared according to the instructions provided below. They will also be reviewed by the program committee, and papers accepted for presentation at the conference will be included in the proceedings (containing Extended Abstract in the title).

Important Dates:
Deadline for paper submission: February 4th, 2008 (firm deadline)
Notification of acceptance or rejection: April 8th, 2008
Final paper camera ready copy: April 25th, 2008
Conference dates: July 10-11th, 2008

Full Call for Papers is available at http://www.dimva2008.org/cfp2008.html