The National Security Agency will host a “cyber-challenge similar to those that regularly threaten national security,” open to students at any U.S. based academic institution. The exercise will run from September 20, 2019 to January 10, 2020.
From NSA:
The annual Codebreaker Challenge offers students a closer look at the type of work done at NSA and provides the opportunity to develop skills needed to achieve the Agency’s national security mission. The problems touch on skills like software reverse engineering, cryptanalysis, exploit development, block chain analysis and more.
This year’s challenge scenario is about tech savvy terrorists who have developed a new suite of communication tools that are being used for attack planning purposes. Intelligence suggests the terrorists are communicating via TerrorTime, a custom Android secure messaging app. Those who attempt the challenge will be required to reverse engineer and develop new exploitation capabilities against TerrorTime to enable message spoofing, user masquerades, and message decryption.
