COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO Graduate students at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs will compete in a virtual cyber war against students from around the globe Friday.
From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Engineering Room 140, ten students enrolled in Computer Science 591, Fundamentals of Computer and Network Security, will compete in the International Capture the Flag Competition.
The contest involves the team’s defense of its computer network while attacking the networks of other student teams from 17 universities located in six countries.
The UCCS team is the first Colorado university team to participate.
“Competition is a fun and challenging way to apply the principles we learn in the classroom and in the laboratory,” Edward Chow, professor, Engineering, and the course instructor said. “With ever-increasing malicious cyber attacks such as virus, phishing e-mail and spam, how to secure our computers and IT infrastructure is a national security challenge today. It is very important to emphasize information assurance in our curriculum, arm our students with cyber defense skills, and raise the general public’s awareness on cyber security issues. All these are necessary to ensure the bright future of the Internet that our society heavily depends on.”
In the competition, each team is given a virtualized computer server installation. The server provides a number of services and many undisclosed vulnerabilities developed by the contest organizers.
Each team’s goal is to maintain services without compromise throughout the contest. All teams receive identical copies of the virtual server and must fix vulnerabilities without disrupting service. At the same time, the teams use their knowledge to compromise the servers run by other teams. Compromising a service will allow a team to bypass the service security mechanisms and to “capture the flag.”
During the contest a scoring system keeps track of which services are available and which services have been compromised.
For more information about the contest, visit. http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/%7Evigna/CTF/
The winner of the June 2005 competition was a team from Politecnico di Milano, Italy. This year, the competition will again field teams from Italy as well as top U.S. colleges, and colleges in Austria, Austrailia, Germany and Argentina.
The Information Assurance Curriculum at UCCS is certified by the Committee on National Security Systems. Only two information assurance programs in Colorado bear the certification.
UCCS, located on Austin Bluffs Parkway in northeast Colorado Springs, is the fastest growing university in Colorado and one of the fastest growing universities in the nation. The university offers 25 bachelor’s degrees, 17 master’s and two doctoral degrees. The campus enrolls about 7,800 students annually.