Drishti
CSO committee holds picoCTF - the large cybersecurity hacking competition
With pizza boxes splayed across the table, caffeinated soda laying at arms reach, and laptops stationed in front of them ready to be used, exhilaration pumped through the competitor’s bodies as they got ready to compete in this year's picoCTF CMU cybersecurity competition.
On March 23, 2022, TAMS Committee heads for the CSO Cybersecurity committee Dylan Li and Jocelyn Zhang arranged the annual picoCTF competition - the large cybersecurity hacking competition in which middle and highschool students develop creative solutions to address security challenges. As committee heads, both individuals possess a passion toward cybersecurity, believing that it poses as an outlet for creative expression and innovation.
“It’s definitely a lot of fun. You get to experiment with different things, learn a lot about cybersecurity, and learn how things work in general,” Li said. “Cybersecurity is just a lot of messing around until you kind of figure it out, so it is very experimental.”
Although several of the competitors are still relatively new to the field of cybersecurity, picoCTF allows them to acquire new knowledge in the form of mind-stimulating challenges, hands-on experience, and interaction with peers. Kevin Liu, a current TAMS junior in the computer science track, has gained experience with cryptography by participating in the competition.
“The problem [I worked on] is called cryptography, “ Liu said. “Essentially, I just need to do math to make this function fast enough. It is hard, but it was fun trying to see what I could do [by] learning new things about cybersecurity.”
Sachi Hansalia, another TAMS junior in the computer science track, also utilized this competition as a means to obtain greater knowledge in the cybersecurity realm. Specifically, Hansalia learned about buffer overflow attacks when trying to solve a challenge regarding the concept.
“[I learned that] whenever you get an input for passwords and it's expecting a certain number of bytes and you enter too many, it’ll overflow,” Hansalia said. “So, you can use that vulnerability to rewrite the code and a lot of times you can use a pointer to point to [the appropriate information].”
Thus far, in addition to picoCTF, the committee has engaged in several events and hopes to pursue more in the near future.
“We’ve done a lot of workshops,” Zhang said. “We did a cryptography one (an encryption type thing) and we’ve done cyberstart through the year. We [also] did UT CTF and picoCTF right now. Sometime in April we are going to [compete] at Lockheed Martin for Cyberquest.”
As the committee continues to grow, they hope to expand opportunities to a wider range of TAMS students with various skill-sets. With cybersecurity becoming increasingly relevant in the technological world today, the TAMS Cybersecurity committee has already begun paving the path toward a more secure future.
