PolySec Lab

Competitions

Poster Competition

ISACA logo

We invite full-time undergraduate and graduate students to submit poster presentations on emerging topics in the field of cyber security, information assurance and forensics, which include but not limited to Internet of Things (IoT) security, Cloud security, mobile security, e-commerce security, secure coding etc.

The goal of the poster session is to raise awareness among the fair’s audience on the topic that you choose to present. Thanks to the Los Angeles Chapter of ISACA, poster competition winners will receive:

  • First place: $500
  • Second place: $250
  • Third place: $125
  • Fourth place: $75
  • Fifth place: $50

More information regarding competition information, presentation tips, posterboard specifications & recommendations can be found in the following:
Poster Session Guidelines (PDF)


Capture the Flag (CTF)

Capture the Flag (CTF) is a special kind of information security competitions. There are three common types of CTFs: Jeopardy, Attack-Defence and mixed.

Jeopardy-style CTFs has a couple of questions (tasks) in range of categories. For example, Web, Forensic, Crypto, Binary or something else. Team can gain some points for every solved task. More points for more complicated tasks usually. The next task in chain can be opened only after some team solve previous task. Then the game time is over sum of points shows you a CTF winer. Famous example of such CTF is Defcon CTF quals.

Well, attack-defence is another interesting kind of competitions. Here every team has own network(or only one host) with vulnarable services. Your team has time for patching your services and developing exploits usually. So, then organizers connects participants of competition and the wargame starts! You should protect own services for defence points and hack opponents for attack points. Historically this is a first type of CTFs, everybody knows about DEF CON CTF - something like a World Cup of all other competitions.

CTF games often touch on many other aspects of information security: cryptography, stego, binary analysis, reverse engeneering, mobile security and others. Good teams generally have strong skills and experience in all these issues.

To learn more visit: CTF Time


Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC)

CCDC is a two day event and the first competition that specifically focuses on the operational aspect of managing and protecting an existing "commercial" network infrastructure. Not only do students get a chance to test their knowledge in an operational environment, they have the opportunity to experience real time incident response.

To learn more visit: WRCCDC Official Site