On September 9th the NSA will launch its fourth annual Codebreaker Challenge -- a hands-on, software reverse engineering challenge in which students work to complete mission-focused objectives and push their university to the top of the competition leaderboard. UMBC did well, both individually and as a campus, in last year's challenge.
The theme of this year's challenge is countering improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and students will be given six tasks of increasing difficulty, culminating in them developing a capability to permanently disable the IED software (in the fictional scenario.)
Feedback from previous iterations of the challenge indicated that students were able to learn a great deal from participating.
- The challenge will be hosted at https://codebreaker.Ltsnet.net.
- The challenge will begin on 9 September 2016 at 9:00pm ET, and will end on 31 December 2016 at midnight.
- Students should register for the site using their .edu email addresses.
- Links to software reverse engineering lectures and other educational material can be found on the resources page.
