The South African National Research Network (SANReN) team hosted its seventh Cyber Security Challenge (CSC) competition during the Centre for High-Performance Computing (CHPC) National Meeting at Kruger Gate Hotel and Skukuza, Mpumalanga, from 3 – 8 December 2023. The purpose of the competition is to stimulate interest in the field of network/information security within Southern African tertiary education institutions. Thus, the competition is aimed at university students who are interested in information security fields such as penetration testing, incident response, digital forensics, and security training.
133 teams from 20 tertiary education institutions from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Lesotho and Namibia competed for spots in the final. Excellent skills were showcased by all teams and the CSC committee was proud to welcome the following top 10 teams (39 students) to the 2023 SANReN Cyber Security Challenge final:
- B1str0m4th – North-West University
- BuzzHackYear – University of Cape Town (Engineering)
- CtrlAltElite – University of Johannesburg (Engineering)
- CodeClappers – University of the Witwatersrand (Computer Science)
- CSyndicate – Rhodes University
- FLUKE – University of Johannesburg (Computer Science)
- NullPointer – University of the Witwatersrand (Engineering)
- Password1234 – University of Pretoria
- Prowl Patrol – University of the Western Cape
- REvil – Namibia University of Science and Technology
During the competition, the above teams were exposed to the following cybersecurity challenges:
- Jeopardy-styled Capture the Flag (CTF) event which assessed the critical thinking skills of participating teams by requiring them to complete challenges that replicate real-world scenarios. The challenges include binary exploitation, cryptography, web exploitation, reverse engineering, digital forensics, and mobile phone security.
- Attack and Defend challenge for team vs. team battles. Here every team has their own system that consists of dedicated preconfigured hardware and software. In the Attack/Defend competition, the teams must hack each other but also fix vulnerabilities in their own system (through patching).
- Orange Cyberdefense sponsored a unique cyber security challenge focusing on application programming interfaces (API) vulnerabilities and security. APIs are often used in the development of web applications and, therefore, necessitate the understanding and testing of such APIs to ensure the security of web applications. This challenge also exposes teams to the art of penetration testing.
- MathWorks/Opti-Num Solutions sponsored a unique cyber security challenge focusing on the utilisation of machine learning classification algorithms in a MATLAB environment to identify cyber security attacks in collected network data. This challenge offers an opportunity for teams to gain exposure to the use of machine learning to combat cyber-attacks.
The competition came to a successful conclusion on the 7th of December and the winning teams were announced during the Awards Ceremony hosted at the Nombolo Mdhluli Conference Centre in the Skukuza Rest Camp.
Cyber Security Challenge (CSC) Competition – Overall
First Place: B1str0m4th – North-West University
Second place: REvil – Namibia University of Science and Technology
Third Place: CSyndicate – Rhodes University
ISPA Inspires Education Sponsorship
The Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA) Social Development working group embarked on projects working towards the development of South Africa’s youth. A key project is the ISPA Inspires Educational Sponsorship, which is an initiative supporting young individuals pursuing a career in the ICT Sector. As a sponsor for the SANReN CSC 2023 Competition, ISPA will be awarding one educational sponsorship to a promising young CSC participant to achieve their ambitions of working in the ICT industry. The receiver of the ISPA Inspires Educational Sponsorship: Ruchelle Coetzee (University of the Western Cape). Ruchelle Coetzee will be pursuing an MSc Computer Science degree in 2024.
Attack and Defend Challenge
Sponsored Challenges
API Challenge: Password1234 – University of Pretoria
MATLAB Classification Challenge: B1str0m4th – North-West University
Sponsors
Much appreciation goes to our Cyber Security Challenge 2023 Sponsors
