This weekend, members of RPISEC participated in the Cyber Security Awareness Week Capture the Flag qualifiers hosted by the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. I am happy to share that the team qualified for the competition to take place in Brooklyn on October 29th for a $500 prize.
The qualifiers were set up as a series of independent tests of computer security knowledge, including cryptography, web security, cyberforensics, vulnerability exploitation, and reverse engineering. The competition is referred to as a "capture the flag" game because successfully hacking into each challenge yields a secret flag which is submitted to a scoring system for points.
RPISEC ended the 48-hour competition with 7,956 points, in 5th place among the 85 participating teams. As only undergraduate teams from the continental U.S. are eligible for the finals, RPISEC ranked 2nd among the finalists after a team from Carnegie Mellon University.
This is not the first year that RPISEC has participated in the CSAW challenge; last year, RPI placed 3rd in the qualifier and 2nd in the final round. In 2008, there was no final round and RPISEC placed 2nd. In addition, last year participants from RPI took 1st place in the Cyber Security Quiz Tournament, another event held during CSAW.
The club officers would like to extend special thanks to sophomores Shawn Denbow, Paul Ignatenko, and Jeremy Pope for participating and solving 16 challenges for the team.