In October 2025, the Chair of AI in IT Security at the University of Regensburg organised its first "Capture the Flag" event (CTF). The event was organised in collaboration with Timo Stark from the company "Germany's Best Hackers". The participants consisted of students and external interested parties. The aim of the event was to impart practical skills and a deeper understanding of IT security.
At a CTF event, participants try to detect and exploit security vulnerabilities in systems in a controlled environment. In teams of two to three people, the participants worked on various task-based challenges from different application areas of IT security.
The tasks ranged from simple validation gaps in web APIs to complex cryptography tasks.
The LLM challenge was a particular highlight. In addition to the classic categories such as web, cryptography or network traffic, it also highlighted current vulnerabilities in dealing with large language models (LLMs). In particular, the task made it clear to the participants that information can be obtained through skilful input, even if the model tries to prevent this through internal rules, which leads to new security gaps in modern AI applications.
The Chair of AI in IT Security would like to thank all participants for their keen interest and active participation and is already looking forward to the upcoming events.