Qualifying to DEF CON CTF 2020
Everyone will have a chance to qualify through our online event on March 27th!
Start practicing now, either by solving our old challenges or by playing in awesome CTFs.
Pre-qualifiers
Only the world’s top teams make it to DEF CON. This enables the event to explore the cutting edge of the amazing things that the world’s hackers are capable of. But the trick, of course, is figuring out who these hackers are. In CTF, this is done through cut-throat competition.
Every year, the DEF CON CTF organizers select a number of prominent events in the CTF community as prequalifiers. The winner of each of these is automatically invited by the Order of the Overflow to compete in DEF CON CTF, and the OOO completes the roster by selecting teams through our own qualification round (scheduled this year for March 27th!) as well as last year’s DEF CON champion.
We select pre-qualifying events according to several considerations. We always look for quality events that present a variety of interesting challenges to their participants. We look for both prominent events with an established history and promising up-and-comers. And we have an additional metric: connecting the various global hacker communities. We want qualifiers not only to represent quality and innovation, but also to enable DEF CON to be a place where top hackers from the different worldwide hacker communities come together!
To that end, the Order of the Overflow has selected the following events as pre-qualifiers:
- CodeBlue CTF 2019 - Prequalified: Cykor
- HITCON CTF 2019 - 12 December 2019
- CTFZone 2020 - TBD 2020 (qualifying round 30 November 2019)
- hxp 36C3 CTF 2019 - Prequalified: pasten
- PlaidCTF 2020 - TBD
Additionally, teams will prequalify through the following DEF CON events:
- DEF CON 2019 CTF Finals - 19 August 2019 - prequalified: PPP
- DEF CON China’s BCTF 2020 - TBD
- DEF CON 2020 CTF Qualifiers - 27 March 2020 - will qualify top N non-qualified teams (N will be crypto-committed before the qualifiers begin)
From these events, we will identify the top hackers in the CTF community, invite them to DEF CON, and watch them battle it out at DEF CON 28. See you there!
