Capture The Packet – Official DEF CON Competition Event Disclaimer

Event: Capture The Packet
Venue: DEF CON 34 Las Vegas Official Competition

IMPORTANT NOTICE TO ALL PARTICIPANTS

Capture The Packet has been a Black Badge event over a dozen times, and our expectations for participants remain the same: you should be solving the challenges. Not your AI.

No Liability – Local AI Use

By choosing to run a local model against our challenges, you acknowledge that:

  • We are not responsible for any corruption of your model weights, degradation of fine-tunes, or destruction of your precious datasets.
  • If your model becomes confused, broken, or develops an existential crisis as a result of our challenges, we accept no liability whatsoever.

No Liability – Online/Cloud AI Use (If You Ignore Us Anyway)

Should you foolishly attempt to use online APIs, cloud-based LLM services, or any hosted model against our challenges despite this warning:

  • We are not responsible and you will hold us harmless for your account being banned.
  • We are not responsible and you will hold us harmless for your system being compromised.
  • We are not responsible and you will hold us harmless for the massive token run costs you will incur as our challenges spam-prompt and adversarially confuse your API calls.
  • We are not responsible and you will hold us harmless for any other absolutely horrible things that happen to you, your infrastructure, or your wallet.

VIOLATION WARNING: THE WALL OF SHEEP

If we catch you violating these rules by using online services anyway, rest assured that your details will be placed on a list for a special Wall of Sheep activity that may or may not happen on-site or in the future years from now when you least expect it…

We promise to use this information in the most ridiculous way possible.

By Participating, You Acknowledge:

  • This is a human-first competition designed to test human skill and creativity.
  • AI-assisted solving undermines the spirit of Black Badge events and DEF CON culture.
  • We are not liable for any consequences – technical, financial, or otherwise — resulting from your decision to use AI against our challenges.

Play fair. Solve with your brain. Have fun.