After eight hours of tense competition, the Duy Tan University team ISITDTU outstandingly beat many strong opponents from South Korea, Poland, Japan, Ukraine and others to finally obtain the Third prize of the WhiteHat Contest 11, which took place on June 25.
WhiteHat Contest applies knowledge of network security and is organized quarterly by Bkav corporation. Taking place on the WarGame system (http://wargame.whitehat.vn) of the WhiteHat.vn Vietnamese network security forum, WhiteHat Contest 11 is an attractive match between 227 teams from all over the world. This edition was the second time the contest was open for teams from all nations, and the first time the organizers decided to award prizes to international teams instead of limiting them to Vietnamese teams like previously.
The participants in WhiteHat Contest 11 clashed with each other in a capture-the-flag (CFT) Jeopardy contest, an in-depth computer security knowledge contest format based on the cyberwar game model. The teams have to solve challenging problems in five topics:
Web Vuln (web vulnerabilities),
Reverse (decompiling),
Pwnable (exploiting software vulnerabilities),
Forensics (digital investigation), and
Crypto (cryptography)
At WhiteHat Contest 11, the level of difficulty of the questions goes up as the WhiteHat.vn forum collaborated with Vietnamese leading network security groups when creating them. After the first three hours, the ISITDTU team (comprised of students of the DTU Faculty of Information Technology) scored 100 points and ranked 6th. Right after this, however, ISITDUT was overtaken and went down to 10th position and 500 points for many hours. When only 30 minutes of contest time were left, the DTU “warriors” made a spectacular comeback solving two problems in a row and climbing to 3rd position with 800 points.
“The problems in WhiteHat Contest 11 require us to firmly grasp in-depth knowledge, to know English reasonably well, to be able to work nimbly, and to have a deep understanding to deal with the situations the contest sets us,” explains Nguyen Oanh Thuong of the ISITDTU team. “The contest sees the participation of students in Information Technology and of young IT enthusiasts, and of experts and technicians currently working at international network security companies. It is really the perfect opportunity for us to get in touch with real life, and to learn and acquire a lot of useful knowledge and experience, rather than the purely theoretical knowledge we studied.”
Previously, DTU students already achieved many noteworthy feats at national and regional intellectual “arenas” in information security, such as:
(1)Becoming the only Central Vietnamese participants and also the only participants from a non-public university or college for four years in a row (2012-2015) to enter the national finals of the “Students and Information Security” contest and to obtain many big prizes at this contest.
(2)(2) Being one of two official representatives of Vietnam to take part in the “Cyber SeaGame 2015” finals - generally seen as the regional finals of the “Students and Information Security” contest - and ending 6th.
(3)(3) Being the only representatives of Vietnam and ending as the 4th university at SCRT Information Security’s 2016 International Information Security contest in Geneva, Switzerland.
(Media Center)