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
- CTF: Most Fun
- CTF: Most Innovative
- Challenge: Most Difficult/Complicated
- PHDays: socket.recvfrominto
- Codegate: membership
- Hack.lu: Garrettling
- GitS: Byte Sexual
- [WINNER: DEF CON: dosfun4u]
- Codegate: running_danbi
- seccon: Golden gate
- PlaidCTF: bronies
- Challenge: Most Fun
- PHDays: Escape from Minecraft
- DEF CON: dosfun4u
- Hack.lu: Hotcows dating
- Hack.lu: Oreo
- [WINNER: GitS: Pwn Adventure 2]
- PHDays: yet another pyjail
- Challenge: Best Crypto
- [WINNER: CSAW: Feal]
- Hack.lu: Peace Pipe
- PHDays: schoolmath
- PlaidCTF: whee wheeeee
- OlympicCTF: GuessGame
- Challenge: Best pwnable
- DEF CON: dosfun4you
- [WINNER: Hack.lu: Oreo
- GitS: Byte Sexual
- Codegate: membership
- Most unexpected solution
- [WINNER: Hotcows Dating]
- Lightning 4 from DEF CON Qualifiers (Watcom C++ compiler bug)
- RuCTF Quals 2014 - Stegano 400
- SECCON: ROP: Impossible
- Olympic CTF 2014 - Just No One
- Best tool made for CTF
- Top CTFTime Team
- 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
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.