Computing Early Career Research success at 3rd Annual UK Cyber Security PhD Winter School

The 3rd Annual UK Cyber Security PhD Winter School, sponsored by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and co-organised by the UK Cyber Security PhD Network, took place virtually on 10-12 January 2022.

During the event, several talks, keynote sessions and panel discussions were held. Talks were divided into three tracks that participants could choose from:

• Society and Privacy
• AI-related Security
• Protocols and Cryptography

The panel discussions helped guide attendees in building their own international network, and discussed what opportunities were available to them as newly graduated researchers and postdocs. There were many useful tips mentioned and discussed from the perspectives of more experienced academics, professors and researchers in the industry.

As part of the winter school, the "Capture the Flag" (CTF) Competition was hosted by Hack the Box. School of Computing Early Career Researchers Pierre Mondon, Matthew Boakes and Yichao Wang played as a team and came second out of 13 teams. Pierre Mondon, who has played many CTF competitions in the past, scored First Blood (first flag of the competition), and got the most flags in the competition as an individual. The team aimed to tackle 21 challenges over a 10 hour period, each challenge ranging in difficulty. Those challenges included:

• Web security: find vulnerabilities on misconfigured servers and Break them.
• Cryptography: exploit some poorly implemented encryption schemes.
• Digital forensics: find secret information hidden within a large number of files and systems.
• Open-source intelligence (OSINT): using publicly available sources to find secret information.
• Full pwn: exploiting a range of vulnerable programs running on remote servers to gain server administrator privileges.

They managed to achieve an incredible 16 challenges out of the total 21. At the last minute, one hour before the end, they were overtaken by a team who scored one more challenge to take first place. The team who took third place achieved 11 out of 21 challenges.

Yichao said: "It was a good chance for me to learn something new during the competition, and it was enjoyable to play as a team."

Following the game, the team are determined to review their weaknesses so that they can target areas to improve on for future CTFs.

Further information about the Winter School is available here:
https://www.surrey.ac.uk/uk-cyber-security-phd-winter-school/winter-school-programme