This is a succinct textbook on solving cybersecurity challenges presented by traditional "Jeopardy-style" Capture-The-Flag (CTF) competitions.
In the security CTF world, picoCTF is often cited as an excellent CTF for beginners. More than most CTF's, we tailor our problems to build on each other and ramp competitors up to more advanced security topics. This has all been done through our annual CTF, but with this Primer, we slowly branch into education outside of the CTF format.
For years, we dreamed at picoCTF of providing more formal instruction about the myriad of challenges that we present in our CTF's. There will always be challenges that are beyond the scope of any textbook, but in 2020, there are many that do fall within such a scope. In the present times, such a foundation of knowledge actually can be the basis of a fruitful career in many computer-related fields!
Since kicking off our Discord server in 2019, we've realized more fully how amazing the picoCTF community is. In that community, there have been multiple requests to contribute to this textbook, and there is no one better to contribute to this textbook than our own community.
Please see GitHub's https://opensource.guide for great advice on contributing to any open source project. More specifically, see our own CONTRIBUTING files for details on what sort of contributions will be most helpful for us.
Thank you for your interest and support of picoCTF!
Our Discord server is our main connection with our community at the current time (as of this writing, that is October 2020). Anyone is free to join this Discord server by accepting this invite:
This community is comprised mostly of picoCTF competitors and other CTF enthusiasts. But there are also staff developers, administrative leads, research leads, open-source contributors, and many other sorts of people.
We have specific channels for primer related conversations, but you are welcome to post questions in any channel to get started.
LT is the best point-of-contact for hacking on this Primer.
NOTE: asciidoctor is a hard dependency. You must install it in order to transform *.adoc source files into HTML or user facing formats, as our Makefile does!
NOTE: pygments.rb is a Ruby Gem which is a soft dependency for syntax
coloring. If this gem is not installed, everything will work besides color
highlighting of code blocks.
The following line compiles book.adoc into book.html with a table of contents.
$ make
If you're just testing how your text looks as HTML, then after you compile,
you can just open book.html in a browser.
The deploy.sh is just a simple time-saving script for us to copy files as
needed to our production Primer server.