Courtesy of Valencia Cyber Security
ACM Cyber, a student-organized community within the UCLA chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, recently held its third annual Capture the Flag cybersecurity competition at Covel Commons and online.
The annual event, which has drawn approximately 100 students to participate in person for the last three years, also saw 30 high school students, mostly from Valencia High School, take part in the contest for the first time on February 8 and 9. The student teams competed with one another to solve more than 50 cybersecurity challenges over the weekend.
While the college students were mostly from UCLA, contestants were also from UC Riverside and other local schools. More than 1,000 teams participated online from across the U.S. and 20 other countries including India, Vietnam, Germany, France, Japan and Australia.
Challenges in this year’s LA CTF included exploiting an insecure shuffling algorithm, forging a commit signature on GitHub and impersonating the GitHub Classroom user, hacking a vulnerable blockchain smart contract, attacking the Next.js dev server to leak sensitive information, taking advantage of a memory corruption vulnerability in programming language OCaml and more.
In addition to the competition, the event also featured a keynote speaker — electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Nader Sehatbakhsh, alumni panels with previous ACM Cyber at UCLA members and officers, and a conference village for UCLA’s engineering clubs.
UCLA team Nathan16 placed first in the UCLA Division. Despite only having two players, the team was able to place 58th overall, an impressive result competing against the best teams worldwide.
The challenges varied in difficulty, ranging from beginner to advanced levels. Every challenge was solved by at least one team, with many solved just a few minutes into the competition. But one challenge was not solved until 37 hours into the competition, and no team was able to solve every challenge.
Sponsors for the competition included Microsoft, SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, The Aerospace Corporation, Crowdstrike, Google Cloud, OtterSec, BinaryNinja and Amber.
Details of the competition and photos of the participants can be found at the LA CTF’s website.