EECS Students, Mentored by Chen, Compete in UCSB International Capture The Flag Competition

The competition is a distributed, wide-area security exercise, whose goal is to test the security skills of the participants (some of them are even security professionals).

Prof. Yan ChenStudents from the EECS 354 class- Network Penetration and Security, mentored by Prof. Yan Chen and three additional EECS students (Srinivas Balusu, Andrew Kahn, and Xitao Wen) participated in the annual UCSB International Capture The Flag (also known as the iCTF) on Friday, Dec. 6, 2013, with over 89 school teams and 1300 individual participants from around the world.

The competition is a distributed, wide-area security exercise, whose goal is to test the security skills of the participants (some of them are even security professionals). The Capture The Flag contest is multi-site, multi-team hacking contest in which a number of teams compete independently against each other.

In 2010, the NU team placed 8th out of 72 teams worldwide. The winner of this year's competitiion, will receive a $1,024 cash prize.

The UCSB CTF evolved from a number of previous security "live exercises" that were carried out locally at UCSB, in 2001 and 2002. The first wide-area edition of the UCSB CTF was carried out in December 2003. In that CTF, fourteen teams from around the United States competed in a contest to compromise other teams' network services while trying to protect their own services from attacks.

In the following years, the size of the iCTF kept increasing and is now the largest CTF hacking competition ever performed on the Internet.

Congratulations to this year's team on your hard work and representing EECS with great pride!

McCormick News Article