Allen Cyber Invitational

What is it?

The Allen Cyber Invitational is a student-created annual cybersecurity competition that is open to all high school students in the DFW area. Students will be challenged in many facets of cybersecurity such as cryptography, exploitation (Binary & Web) , shell commands, and system hardening. Teams will first participate in a seeding round where they will need to complete a series of CTF-based challenges. Based on each teams performance in the seeding round, they will be divided into three divisions (Platinum, Gold, and Silver). After divisions are made, teams will be presented with a collection of puzzles to complete to earn points for their team. After 40 minutes, teams will have to participate in a battle round, where they will wager points for a big a payout if they complete a difficult challenge. This will repeat 3 more times. Each division will have breaks during certain puzzle and battle rounds. Then students will have lunch and listen to a speaker. Competitors will then be presented with an immersive and realistic ISS-themed scenario, where they will have to harden the space station’s systems against threats. Awards will then be given to the winning teams in each division.

How we started

The Allen Cyber Invitational started as an Idea from a teacher of my partners and I and that quickly turned into the competiton that it became. From all the late nights drafting ideas and the drafting and redrafting of Promo videos and Posters, to the stress before the investors meeting as we were anxious to show our progress, This Competition is truly something I will never forget, you can see the timeline of progress on LinkedIn as I have made posts showing the process of creation. I had assembled my team of 8, eight of the most passionate and experienced people in the CS department at Allen who were also close friends, and we started planning!

After we had our team, we jumped straight in. First we needed an outline and a vision for this project. We had several meeting going for hours at a time on what we wanted to achive and was was realistic, finally after over 20 hours of meetings, conversations and thousands of ideas we had a solid vision on what we wanted our competition to look like. Thus began the puzzle era of the invitational.

Puzzles

We decided we wanted our projects to resemble the aspects of cyber security competitions that we all loved, taking the CTF puzzles from PicoCTF and combinding them with the image style of Cyber Patriot in the end we decided on different sections of the competition. Having multiple puzzle rounds and one big scenario round after lunch.

Timeline

This brings us to the puzzles the first half of the competition. The puzzles take after picoCTF puzzles where a flag is hidden somewhere in a system and its up to the competitor to figure out where the flag is. They then take this flag and put it in a submission box which will either give them points if they input the correct flag or tell thm to try again and reward no pints. These puzzles span a variety of topics including, bash basics, cryptography, web exploitation, binary exploitation, forensics, and reverse engineering. Each of these topics has several puzzles of varying difficulty [easy, medium, hard or Master], Each of these difficulties has a point value assigned to it, rewarding the competitor an ampe number of points depending on how challenging the puzzle.

There are four puzzle rounds for our three sections of competitors [Silver, Gold, Platium], each of these sections will compete 3 times allowing them a 45 minute break during the puzzle rounds. This allows for competitors to be refreshed fro the other rounds so we don't wear them out before the scenario.

Battle Rounds

During the puzzle planning process we had a revelation, Puzzles are really freaking boring. Who wants to sit at a screen salving CTF puzzles for hours on end. Competitors are gonna lose motivation and be thoroughly uninterested in any of the contene. To fix this problem we though of puzzle battle rounds! The Battle rounds are the last 15 minutes of every puzzle section where competitors will race against other competitors to answer CTF puzzles for points, but instead of the puzzles giving them points the puzzles will give them a position which will then giv them a multiplier to points they wager. Essentially competitors will wager points before the battle round and if thy do well they get more points but if they can't answer the puzzles then they lose a slight amount of points. This will add some excitement in between puzzle rounds keeping the competitors engaged.

Scenario

We wanted to base the scenario off of the International Space Station and really base the experience off of Cyber Patriot. To do this we wanted a long and interupted scenario where studets need to secure the different parts of the ISS. While this is happening Students are being attacked by a red team, who is actively breaking into the competitiors systems and pushing them back. This will create a feeling of an uphill battle as competitors are fighting against hackers to secure tand make safe the ISS!

Flyer

Above is the flyer we created to promote the competition, throughout later stages we had more of a social media marketing presence including Instagram, YouTube, These all redirected to our website where competitors could register for the event!

Reflection

The project was like nothing I've ever worked on before. The sheer scale and complexity was something I had never imagined myself doing in high school. The next thing I know I'm in charge of 7 other students and a strict deadline and was told to make it happen. Working with locations and sponsors, doing investment meetings and having constant communcation with my team during this process was experience that I'm lucky to have.

This project changed the way I approach problems and definitly taught me about the importance of hard work. It also opened my eyes to how much people can accomplish when they're passionate. Before this project began I think I had sent maybe 50 emails in my life and halfway through the project that number was closer to 400. I've definitly learned about the corporate world, my own technical skills, How to manage Logistics and how to manage a large multi-month project.

The relationship's I've built with the members of my team are something I wasn't expecting but I think is one of the most fulfilling things I've gained from this project. I started this project with the majority of the team being my friends. However, after hours of working with these people, spending most of my nights and my saturdays workign on this invitational with them. These people are some of the closest friends I have ever had. I'm so happy that I'm off to college with some of them in the near future. This project has been grueling, long and difficult, but its also been fulfilling, taught me alot about technology and myself. Ultimatly I am grateful to have had such a wonderful oppurtunity and I'm excited to take the skills I've learned on this Invitational to future endevours!

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