Newshot Article title: Is There Still Any Need to Hold CTF Competitions?
Body:
There Is No Longer Any Need to Hold Traditional CTF Competitions
To be honest, as AI technology develops, I increasingly feel that there is no longer much need to hold traditional CTF competitions. These words may offend quite a few CTF enthusiasts—after all, it was once a youthful memory of everyone staying up late solving challenges, researching vulnerabilities, and competing for Flags. But times have changed, and we can't keep clinging to the competition model of the past while using AI to write code and hunt for vulnerabilities.
- AI's impact on CTF is all-encompassing
In the past, solving a reverse engineering challenge might require familiarity with assembly and decompilation tools, and spending a long time researching before finding a breakthrough. For Web challenges, you also had to analyze the source code yourself, look for vulnerabilities, and construct exploit chains. Now? AI can already assist with code auditing, reverse engineering analysis, vulnerability localization, and exploit writing, and can even use toolchains to automate part of the solving process.
In the past, what was compared was who had richer knowledge, more solid skills, and more experience. Now it has gradually become about whose model is stronger, whose Agent is more usable, and whose automated workflow is more mature. To put it bluntly, competitions used to be person versus person; now it may be person with AI versus person with AI. As for how much technical contribution the contestant themselves actually made—you know how it is, it's hard to assess.
- CTF's fairness and the value of results are declining
Especially for online competitions, it is very difficult for organizers to determine whether contestants used AI, and even harder to determine what model was used, how much compute, and how many automation tools. Even if rules prohibit the use of AI, it is very difficult to truly enforce them.
This creates an awkward problem: for the same challenge, some solve it through their own technical ability, while others hand it directly to AI for analysis, and in the end both can get the Flag. The results look the same, but the abilities behind them may be completely different.
If competition results can no longer accurately reflect a contestant's true technical level, then how much reference value does this ranking still have?
- CTF's challenge model is gradually losing freshness and discriminative power
A large number of challenges revolve around fixed vulnerabilities, classic algorithms, and common exploitation techniques. For humans, these challenges may require long-term accumulation, but for AI trained on a large amount of security knowledge, a considerable portion of them are already routine problems that can be analyzed quickly.
In the past, one challenge could stump dozens of teams; now it may only take one mature AI workflow to break through quickly. The difficulty of the challenges has not disappeared; only the reference point for measuring difficulty has changed.
Of course, AI is not omnipotent. Complex environments, unknown vulnerabilities, and unexpected problems can still make it fail. But this precisely shows that what should be assessed in the future is the ability to solve real security problems, not repeated training in solving routines that AI already covers to a high degree.
- There is no longer any need to hold CTF competitions
I do not think cybersecurity competitions should disappear entirely. Rather, I think traditional CTF, centered on solving challenges to get Flags and determining winners by ranking, can hardly fulfill the past functions of talent selection and ability evaluation.
If competitions cannot guarantee fairness, cannot accurately measure individual ability, and their challenges are increasingly easy for AI to handle automatically, then what meaning is there in the rankings ultimately obtained from investing a large amount of manpower and resources to organize competitions every year?
Continuing to hold them without innovating the competition model will only dilute the value of previously won competition awards, and will ultimately degenerate into a self-entertaining joke. For example, some online CTF competitions have already degenerated into arenas for AI tool contests. Unless competitions are held offline with strict restrictions—such as limiting network access, prohibiting the use of AI large models, and disqualifying anyone found doing so—some good results might be achieved.
Of course, holding competitions can promote exchange, cultivate interest, and also serve as teaching activities. But these reasons cannot prove that the traditional competitive model still needs to be continued on a large scale.
When competitions lose their original intention and meaning, rather than continuing to hold a competition that is increasingly difficult to use to distinguish human from AI ability, it would be better to invest resources in real vulnerability discovery, real-world offense and defense, AI-assisted security research, and problem-solving in unknown scenarios. After all, what the security industry ultimately needs is people who can solve real problems, not people who can only get Flags in a competition environment.
Times have already changed; there is no need to insist on using an old map to find a new continent. Traditional CTF competitions should be heading toward their end.