From September 27 to October 11, a group of Choate students participated in the 2019 picoCTF competition, an online cybersecurity contest organized annually by Carnegie Mellon University. This year, picoCTF brought together more than 5,000 teams from middle and high schools across the United States to compete against one another in topics including reverse engineering, hacking, and decrypting.
The competition has its roots in encouraging students to learn about the cybersecurity industry, which is currently struggling to fill seats with qualified talent. Over the course of the competition, it has successfully drawn over 18,000 participants from across the United States.
Problems ranged from finding the password to a login portal to analyzing lyrics to a rock song with computer code hidden within. The top five teams that solved the most problems by the end of the two-week competition period receives monetary prizes, with the top three teams winning an all-expenses paid trips to Carnegie Mellon for an awards ceremony and a tour of the campus.
This year, Choate had more than twenty participants in the competition working in teams of one to five students. Andrew Lee ’21 said, “The Choate Programming Union organized the teams. The heads of the club decided based on each students’ strengths and experience level which team to assign them to.”
Passionate for math, Lee was the cryptography specialist on his team. “This year, the cryptography questions weren’t very challenging, so I finished them early. I tried to help others out as much as I could with the time we had left,” said Lee. The roles were assigned to fit each member’s specialty and cover the large number of problems. For example, Lee stated, “We designated the Binary Exploitation problems, which is a more traditional type of hacking, to the student in our team with a Linux computer because of the capabilities of the software.”
The competitors had to regularly devote their free time to working and collaborating on the competition problems. Lee said, “The other team [would be] up until four in the morning working. My team and I met in the dining hall during meals every day and in Lanphier Center a lot. Overall, we spent an ungodly amount of time working.” Lee’s team also used Discord, a popular chat platform commonly used by video gamers, when it wasn’t able to meet in person. At the meetings, the main priority was to address the more challenging questions and any individual issues team members were having with their designated category.
The results of the competition have been finalized: Choate’s top two teams were ranked eighth and twenty-ninth, respectively.
Overall, the students had a positive time and gained valuable experience. Heidi Lei ’20 felt that working with a supportive team was particularly rewarding. “Whenever I was stuck on a problem, it was nice to explain my thinking to others on my team because they gave me new insight,” she said. “Some problems combined many topics, and people could contribute their different areas of expertise.”
Though Lee plans and looks forward to participating and helping to organize Choate involvement in the competition next year as well, he is looking forward to having some more time on his hands: “With the competition over now, I will have to start getting used to spending my free time doing things other than looking at my computer screen.”
