WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:02.160 This is gallery from off camera. 00:02.160 --> 00:16.280 So my question, and one of the most interesting things that I've seen year over year, is that there's always this sense of the next organizer has to one-up the last organizer for the CTF's design. 00:16.280 --> 00:17.840 Or in some senses, right? 00:17.840 --> 00:21.160 So in the one year, we had the custom architecture. 00:21.180 --> 00:22.340 And in the other year, we had... 00:22.340 --> 00:22.980 Lightning wrote that. 00:22.980 --> 00:23.760 She's over there. 00:23.800 --> 00:28.080 And in another year, we had a switch of architectures in the middle of the game. 00:28.080 --> 00:29.680 And we've seen those things. 00:29.680 --> 00:31.740 You've been playing CTF for a long time. 00:31.740 --> 00:31.920 Yeah . 00:31.920 --> 00:36.520 Do those, I'll say, tricks actually slow people down? 00:36.520 --> 00:45.480 Or is there... I'm sure in the middle of the first time it happened, there was an, oh crap, what is this? 00:45.480 --> 00:53.020 But what do you think that CTF is going to evolve into based on what we've seen so far? 00:53.020 --> 00:53.320 Yeah. 00:53.320 --> 00:56.880 And maybe I don't want to give spoilers about what Nautilus is doing this year. 00:56.880 --> 00:59.760 I don't know as much even the details about what they're working on. 00:59.760 --> 01:03.100 Because I'm working on this component we can talk about in a little bit. 01:03.780 --> 01:04.380 But that's... yeah. 01:04.380 --> 01:05.240 So it's a great question of all. 01:05.240 --> 01:06.300 It's a couple of pieces to unpack there. 01:06.300 --> 01:07.320 First of all, yeah. 01:07.320 --> 01:08.160 So Lightning is over there. 01:08.160 --> 01:14.300 She built the most horrible architecture that has ever been invented. 01:15.940 --> 01:17.880 And inflicted great pain upon competitors. 01:17.880 --> 01:20.400 I actually personally knew about it in advance. 01:20.980 --> 01:25.760 And in fact, at the time, she was even like, do you want to build a binary ninja architecture plugin for it? 01:25.760 --> 01:28.520 Because I make binary ninjas. 01:28.520 --> 01:29.140 It's my day job. 01:29.140 --> 01:30.740 It's reverse engineering software. 01:31.060 --> 01:32.880 And there was a question of, do you want to add support for it? 01:32.880 --> 01:38.480 And we looked at it and we were like, it's nine bits width instead of a power of two. 01:38.520 --> 01:39.640 It's middle-endian. 01:39.640 --> 01:41.240 So not little-endian or big-endian. 01:41.240 --> 01:41.680 It's middle-endian. 01:41.680 --> 01:42.900 I was just like, nope. 01:42.900 --> 01:43.560 No, I don't. 01:43.560 --> 01:44.840 I have to do real work. 01:44.840 --> 01:45.240 I can't. 01:45.240 --> 01:46.900 I'm not going to spend the amount of time it would take. 01:46.900 --> 01:47.520 Oh , goodness. 01:47.520 --> 01:50.020 But the teams were told the week of. 01:50.020 --> 01:55.820 They're like, by the way, here's a CPU specification for this virtual architecture that the game is running on this year. 01:55.820 --> 01:56.640 Good luck. 01:56.940 --> 01:59.380 And to tell you the truth, I actually told the organizers that year. 01:59.380 --> 02:00.780 I was like, I think this is a bad mistake. 02:00.780 --> 02:02.760 I think it's too much and teams won't be able to do it. 02:02.760 --> 02:03.400 I was wrong. 02:03.400 --> 02:06.540 And I was happy to be wrong because I think it worked out great. 02:06.540 --> 02:09.520 Teams adapted and they built their own tools. 02:09.520 --> 02:12.100 They cobbled together stuff on the fly and they made it work. 02:12.100 --> 02:18.260 And so that, I think, is the hallmark of what makes CTF fun, is that you don't know. 02:18.640 --> 02:24.880 But there is also this sense that over the years, there's a progression and institutional knowledge. 02:24.880 --> 02:37.640 A lot of the changes, whether it's broken or not, whether you have these sort of what are called Superman defenses where you move things around, and sort of knowing and having played before, you do kind of come in with a sense of, I think I know some general techniques that I'm going to use. 02:39.020 --> 02:40.760 So who knows where it's going to go? 02:40.760 --> 02:48.300 I will say that I don't think most organizers look at this explicitly with the goal of, I have to absolutely outdo. 02:48.320 --> 02:50.260 They want to make a good game. 02:50.260 --> 02:54.600 They want to make a game that challenges the competitors, that showcases the best, that's smoothly run. 02:54.720 --> 02:58.860 So especially a team's first year taking over, they don't want to rock the boat too much, you tend to see. 02:59.780 --> 03:03.200 Because you just want to show people, no, no, no, we understand what CTF is. 03:03.200 --> 03:04.620 We're not going to make something it's not. 03:04.620 --> 03:07.380 We're not going to make it totally an unpleasant thing. 03:07.380 --> 03:11.200 We still want this to be the premier catch-the-fly competition. 03:11.500 --> 03:14.820 So it's usually in later years, people start to experiment and try different things. 03:14.820 --> 03:17.880 But yeah, there's been a bunch of crazy stuff over the years. 03:17.880 --> 03:25.000 And so much of that gets lost to the annals of people's minds and history, unfortunately.