Mason Competitive Cyber CTF Courses

This collection of courses is meant to help GMU students in the competitive cyber club learn the basics of how CTF competitions work and the various challenge types that they will encounter. These topics include: linux, scripting, OSINT, reverse engineering, forensics, cryptography, binary exploitation, web app exploitation, and steganography. These courses are layed out in a university structure, so there are 100-level courses, 200-level courses, and so on. This is a new project being launched and is currently under development, so the full coursework is not complete.

CTFs are "Capture-The-Flag" cyber competitions. These are generally layed out like Jeopardy, with various topics containing challenges/questions ranging in difficulty that are assigned a certain point value. The team that gets the most points wins. There are a lot of resources online, and thus it can be overwhelming when trying to figure out what you even need to learn or where to start. These courses are meant to help solve this issue by compiling relevant resources in one place and providing our own material for each topic based on what we think is important to know for getting started with CTFs.

Topics

• Linux
• Scripting
• Misc
• Steganography
• Cryptography
• Forensics
• Reverse Engineering
• Web App Exploitation
• Binary Exploitation

Order of Classes to Take

Out of those that are currently done (for the most part)

1. Linux
2. Scripting
3. OSINT
4. Steganography
5. All the unfinished courses
6. Binary Exploitation (Only do this if you're very confident in your technical skills, this is at the bottom of the entire list of courses)

Contributing

If you want to contribute to this project, please contact [email protected]. We welcome anybody to help contribute their knowledge and grow our available coursework. For example, if you are interested in post-quantum cryptography and that is not yet a course we offer, feel free to get in touch and we will make it happen. If a course already exists and you want to expand or improve upon it, get in touch and we will make that happen as well. This should be an always evolving and growing project for the benefit of everybody.

TODO List

• Create Scripting 200
• Create Cryptography coursework
• Create Reverse Engineering coursework
• Create Web App Exploitation coursework
• Create Forensics coursework
• Link relevant TCTF challanges in courses
• Link relevant external CTF challenges in coureses (such as PicoCTF, TryHackMe, etc.)
• Update course-list.md