The ISITDTU1 team won second prize in the qualifying round of the southern region 2022 ASEAN Student Information Security contest and will advance to the Finals on December 5 in Hanoi.
This ASEAN-wide event is a “Capture the Flag” contest for higher-education institutions, with teams of up to four students each. This year marks the 15th time the contest has been hosted in Vietnam and the fourth time that ASEAN students have been invited. The event took place on the annual “Vietnam Information Security Day” and was organized by VNISA, under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) and the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET).
This year, 72 teams from Vietnam and 40 from Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Singapore, Laos and Thailand participated.
The ISITDTU1 team comes second
Students from all institutions could register and the CTF format was used. Teams were divided into three groups:
- VN1, comprising 34 teams from universities in the North
- VN2, with 38 teams from the South
- ASEAN, with 40 teams from ASEAN countries
The contest lasted for eight hours, and contestants were tested on mounting cyber-attacks against their opponents, and, the same time, defending their own computer networks.
The contest included the following challenges:
- Web Application: Exploit web application vulnerabilities (SQL injection, XSS, session Hijacking)
- Reverse Engineering: Decompile software source code, unpack source code protection packers
- Pwnable: Find bugs, exploit vulnerabilities in server applications, software, or code (buffer overflow, write shell code, format string)
- Crypto/ACM: String decoding, algorithms, algorithmic analysis, algorithmic programming
The preliminary round was held simultaneously in Hanoi and HCMC on October 15.
The ISITDTU2 team win a third prize
After their journey from Da Nang to Ho Chi Minh City, the DTU teams were exhausted, which may have affected their performance. However, ISITDTU1, ISITDTU2 and ISITDTU3 did their best and came second and third.
This year, institutions are only allowed one team in the finals, and, although two DTU teams won prizes in the VN2 group, only one team was eligible. The HCMC University of Technology will also compete.
Nguyen Quang Minh, a K26 CMU TAM student and member of the ISITDTU1 team, said: “In preparation, our team practiced diligently in the university’s Security Open Labs for many months. We also participated in weekly international cyber-security competitions online, carefully reviewing our individual and team progress.
Compared to previous years, this year’s competition focused primarily on Reverse Engineering. Few of the teams could answer questions on that topic, but the marks counted heavily. However, our teams did better than most, although we were able to identify the deficiencies that we’ll need to overcome together in future contests. We are now concentrating on putting in even more effort to achieve the best possible result at the upcoming finals in Hanoi.”
(Media Center)