UCL Students take part in "International Capture the Flag Competition"

On 4th December, a team of students from UCL CS took part in the International Capture the Flag Competition (iCTF). The iCTF is the largest academic hacking competition in the world, and 35 teams from all over the world participated in this year's edition.

The UCL team, named THOR,  was composed of Tom Sigler, Chris Park, Jason Papapanagiotakis, Azeem Ilyas, Salman Khalifa, Luke Roberts, Haran Anand, Alexis Enston, Austin Chamberlain, Jaromir Latal, Enrico Mariconti, and Razvan Ragazan. Ours was the only team representing the UK.

The students had to create a vulnerable program for other teams to exploit, find vulnerabilities in the programs written by other teams, and write both exploits and patches. In the end, the UCL team ranked 14th out of 35. As Gianluca Stringhini, the team's academic supervisor says: "Given that it was our first time participating, I believe this is a great result. We ranked better than teams who have been participating in these competitions for years." More details of the competition can be found at http://scoreboard.ictf2015.net/results/index.html#/scores?_k=ywukty (For reasons that are not clear, the team still appears to be climbing the leaderboard, but it did in fact finish 14th).

Once again, it is absolutely fantastic to see our students taking on big challenges, with the help and guidance of UCL CS academics, coming together to represent the department (and the UK) so effectively. Many congratulations to all who took part, and many thanks to Gianluca without whose enthusiasm in training and supporting our team this would not have been possible. To those that would like to participate in any type of competition in future, we would be most happy to find ways of supporting you - contact me in the first instance. Finally, I give you Team THOR....