• Team Participation: Teams of up to 3 people are allowed. Individual participation is also possible, but teamwork is highly recommended.

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• Challenges: For ease of agent ingestion, this year’s challenges will also be available in a database format compatible with being downloaded and loaded into the autonomous baseline framework and custom agents. While the true flag of the challenges are provided in metadata .json files, if you choose to use an autonomous agent, the agent must validate if the flag it obtains matches the actual flag. Points will be assigned based on the trajectory/transcription/conversation submissions matching the correct flag.​

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• Solution: Participants can analyze the challenges on their own, but the final solution must be generated by a LLM system. Participants are allowed to use any LLM or AI systems as long as the no flags or manual write-ups/solutions were involved. We provide two possible approaches that were commonly used in the previous year's LLM CTF Attack Competition. Competitors are free to choose their approach per challenge. 

  • Human-In-The-Loop (HITL): Participants are allowed to interact with large language models (LLMs) by providing hints or refining inputs through prompt engineering techniques. Competitors can actively guide AI systems—such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini via their web interfaces or local deployed backends—to solve challenges.​

  • Autonomous Framework: Participants are allowed to use any existing autonomous frameworks such as crewAI (https://github.com/crewAIInc/crewAI) available to solve challenges automatically. Or building up their own autonomous frameworks to solve challenges. Participants should bring their tokens or model deployment to use it in the autonomous framework. Challenges solved by this approach will receive a bonus in Creativity points.

  • Competitors can bring their own approaches such as a hybrid approach of an agentic framework with Human-In-The-Loop in addition to the two suggested above, as long as it did not involve manual solution. Good approaches will also receive a bonus in Creativity points.​​​​

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• Report and Submissions: For each solved CTF challenge, participants must generate a solution report that includes:

  • The flag obtained by the agent matching the provided correct flag 
    A human-readable format of the agent’s solution process such as a trajectory, log file or conversation history.

  • If your solution is using Human-In-The-Loop or your own approach, you must submit the conversation history with all original conversation contents including a proof of flag captured and briefly describe your thought and strategy used to solve this challenge.

  • If your solution is using autonomous frameworks, you must submit the generated transcript or trajectory as-is including agent thoughts, actions and observations without any manual tampering.

  • All code and data used during the competition should be uploaded to a git repository as a part of final submission. If competitors are using their own customized models, the model weights and the loading code should also be shared publicly or privately with organizers.

  • Teams should also prepare a final presentation report detailing the approach used, such as their prompting techniques, model usage, tool usage etc. Teams may include in their report how specific challenges affected their agent engineering efforts.
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• Generative AI Requirements: 

  • Human-In-The-Loop (HITL) and customized approaches: Participants can use any of the generative AI systems that available to them (using multiple AI systems is even encouraged) as long as they can provide the name of the AI systems they used in the report, all the solution steps must come from AI system.

  • Autonomous Framework: Participants can use any autonomous frameworks available or create their own agents from scratch. Teams using their originally developed agents will receive a bonus score, as outlined in the Scoring Rubrics section. These frameworks allow the installation of cyber tools in real-time or can be customized with pre-installed cyber tools such as apk2jar, apktool, Ghidra, hopper, Burp Suite, and wireshark. The autonomous framework must be fully automated, with no human-in-the-loop interaction. 

  • For all approaches, the prompts used to guide the AI may be crafted by humans, but they must not contain direct solutions to any of the challenges. Failure to comply with this rule will result in the submission being considered invalid, and a subjective penalty will be applied. All other approaches such as model selection, tool usage, framework workflow etc. are open to the contestants.​