Derek Thomas writes:

Greetings friends, we are in the initial stages of creating a Misec Capture the Flag proving ground. We have been consistently in the top 30% of the competitions that we have entered and I would like to go higher! I think the proving ground is perfect for honing our CTF skills individually and as a team.

The goal is to create a portal that we can upload basic CTF challenges along with an article that describes the fundamental use of tools needed to solve the challenge and the basic thought processes that one would go through. Our hope is to release a challenge on a bi weekly basis, but that may change based on the amount of submissions.

Our secondary goal is to use the challenges that are submitted to the proving ground in a CTF that we host or co-host sometime in the next year. If you register for our CTF portal then you will not be able to compete in our hosted CTF but you will get to compete on our team for CSAW, RUCTFe, GITS, and so on.

We encourage everyone to join no matter what your skill level, and we encourage everyone to submit but it is not a pre-requisite. More than one person can submit a challenge as a group as well. We would like the submissions to be anything that you might see in a challenge.

ZTango has been working day and night to create the site that we will be using and it is coming along great. For now I would like anyone that has blogged about one of the challenges that they have previously solved to send the link to ctf-submissions@michsec.org if you don’t mind having it cross-posted in the CTF Proving Ground. Please let us know if you have any ideas or would like to help in any other way.

To whet your appetite for CTF challenges, check out our teaser challenge at http://ctf.michsec.org/web01