Golden Flag Awards

Celebrating the best in Capture the Flag from 2014

The Golden Flag Awards are a new tradition started at the end of 2014 to honor the best in the year's CTF challenges and events. This is a bit of an experiment and based on community feedback, it's possible things will change for next year.

The award ceremony was held Saturday, January 17th at 1800 EST at the ShmooCon conference in Washington, DC. As soon as video is available of the event, it will be posted here.

Winners

CTF: Most Fun
Hack.lu
CTF: Most Innovative
GitS
Challenge: Most Difficult
DEF CON: dosfun4u
Challenge: Most Fun
GitS: Pwn Adventure 2
Challenge: Best Crypto
CSAW: Feal
Challenge: Best Pwnable
Hack.lu: Oreo
Most unexpected solution
Hotcows Dating
Best tool made for CTF
Pwntools
Top CTFTime Team
Dragon Sector

A large list of nomination categories was shared with the CTF community and based on the feedback from that survey, the most popular categories for awards for final voting were selected.

Transparency and Background

One of the primary goals of this process is to be transparent. We've received some questions about how teams were selected for the vote. A nomination form that was advertised the same way as the vote (via twitter, IRC) was posted in December so everyone would have time to contribute. We've since made those results public. Additionally, as soon as the award ceremony is finished, we'll publish the final results spreadsheet as well.

The full results are now public.

We didn't expect this process to go perfectly the first time, but wanted to get the ball rolling. Hopefully it works well enough that everyone is supportive and excited for improving it in the future as I know all of us involved in it behind the scenes are.

Cast and Crew

  • psifertex (and his wife for the background picture!) main organizer and ball-roller
  • tylerni7, gynvael official voting loss prevention team, and quality assurance
  • BonzoESC, website design
  • Duo Security for providing the awesome trophies at the award ceremony!
  • ShmooCon for being host to the live ceremony and providing the live stream
  • Lastly, and most importantly, thanks to the CTF Community for voting