DoC hosts BAE Systems Capture the Flag Competition

The Department of Computing played host to the "Jeopardy style" BAE Systems Capture the Flag competition on 6th February.

On Saturday 6th February DoC played host to the BAE Systems Capture the Flag competition, an all-day "Jeopardy style" event incorporating a variety of cybersecurity-related challenges including binary exploitation, crypto, problem solving, reverse engineering, trivia, web, packets, and forensics.  Fourteen teams of students took part in a lively and fiercely contested event, which called for the highest level of technical skill, problem solving ability, teamwork and creativity from the teams as they raced against each other to score points by solving a series of challenges of increasing difficulty.

SPS CTF Team Scores

Fueled by pizza, fizzy drinks and sweets, three DoC teams battled it out at the top of the leaderboard with team "dont", comprising Federico Morini (2nd year PhD), Rodrigo Veira Steiner (1st year PhD), Henry Cuttell (3rd year MEng), Michael Cypher (3rd year MEng) and Luke Granger-Brown (3rd year MEng), eventually just edging out "TeamKimber" and the "Forkbombers" in a last minute scramble to submit solutions. Team "dont" won a set of remote controlled quadcopters and winning team member Luke Granger-Brown commented: "The event was absolutely fantastic, putting our entire team to the test as we worked together to solve some incredibly well put-together challenges. It was super exciting and I'm so happy I was able to take part. I wonder what BAE Systems will come up with next year!"

DoC faculty member Prof William Knottenbelt, who joined student team Cesar's Army (finishing mid-table), commented: "The whole day was tremendous fun and it was fantastic to see the energy, enthusiasm and good spirit with which the students - who included all years from first year to masters and PhD level - took part. I myself was delighted to be able to apply a few of the tricks I recently learned in our Applications of Computing in Industry seminars to solving some of the challenges. Hopefully next year we will be able to organise a staff team to take on the students."

Alastair Stevenson, event organiser from BAE Systems, added: "This is the second year we've brought Capture the Flag (CTF) to Imperial; it was great to see even more teams sign up and to welcome back students that competed last year.  We were impressed with the hugely devoted and, at times, quite intense approach the students took to solving the challenges. At times the levels of concentration were such that you could have heard a pin drop!  The scores achieved this year were amongst the highest we've seen at a University CTF event, showcasing the high calibre of cyber skills at Imperial. The last hour saw one of the closest and most dramatic finishes I've ever seen so well done to everyone that took part, and we hope to see you again next academic year."

The final leaderboard was:

Congratulations to the winners!