More COINS students than ever got together to participate in the hack.lu Capture the Flag (CTF) competition from 21st to 23rd October 2014. In an effort to practice their skills in applied IT security, seven COINS students formed a team and competed with 580 teams worldwide for 48 hours. The goal of this „Capture the Flag“ (CTF) competition was to solve several challenges in information security. The tasks ranged from web application vulnerabilities, SQL injection, reverse engineering to cryptography.
Many of the competitors had experience from earlier competitions. At the COINS Ph.D. student seminar last week, the COINS team decided to take part without any special preparation. They finished among the top 50% of all teams. Owing to extensive research project obligations, most team members could only dedicate time in the beginning of the two-day competition. The COINS team reflected the distributed nature of COINS with students being based in four locations (Gjøvik, Grimstad, Oslo, and Trondheim) and communicating by text messaging and video conference.
Congratulations, Ambika, Andrii, Chris, Huihui, Ijlal, Vivek, and Yi-Ching!
