Students from MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the University of Cambridge are to work on a multi-day competition at MIT, “Cambridge 2 Cambridge” (C2C).
The event on March 4 and 5, announced by US President Barack Obama and UK Prime Minister David Cameron last year, is part of a series of US-UK initiatives aimed at harnessing the two nations’ collective brainpower to combat cyber-attacks. A two-part competition features a 24-hour “Capture the Flag”-style hackathon with blended student teams from MIT CSAIL and Cambridge, as well as a “Shark Tank”-style business plan competition in which alumni- and student-led companies pitch their technologies to a panel of industry judges. Winning teams will be awarded cash prizes totalling over $70,000.
Howard Shrobe, the MIT CSAIL principal research scientist who heads the lab’s Cybersecurity@CSAIL initiative, hoped it will be the first of many efforts to foster more international collaboration on cybersecurity. “We think it’s vital to create opportunities for students to actively apply their knowledge to real-world problems, and C2C enables just those sorts of hands-on experiences.”
And Dr Frank Stajano, who leads the Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research at the University of Cambridge, said: “Our students have responded with great enthusiasm and there has been fierce competition during the preselections to get into the set of finalists that will fly to MIT in March. We also envisage that some of the cybersecurity training material we developed for C2C will in due course become practical lab sessions in our undergraduate Computer Science curriculum.”
Hackathon participants will develop and apply attacks and defences. They will compete in a graduated set of exercises touching on such topics as web security, reverse engineering, cryptography and forensics. Start-up teams will employ technical and business skills beyond pure coding, such as pitching to venture capitalists, analyzing the policy implications of their technologies and even speaking to the press in real-world simulations.
BT Security CEO Mark Hughes said: “Initiatives such as C2C will help organisations recruit and nurture talent to address cyber skills gaps in Western democracies. Training a new generation of cybersecurity experts is of vital importance to help protect governments and businesses in today’s interconnected world. As the largest cyber security service provider in the UK, we are very proud to support this great example of international cooperation among students and to be able to work with them for a safer world.”
MIT CSAIL will also be simulcasting its proceedings via the live-streaming app Twitch.
C2C is being supported by the telecommunications company BT as its Gold Sponsor. Microsoft is funding the hackathon cash prizes. Software testing company ForAllSecure created the hackathon competition. Other event sponsors include Cisco Systems, Inc., ThreatStream, Rapid7 and Cybersecurity@CSAIL members Akamai, BAE Systems, BBVA, BP, Boeing, Raytheon and Visa.
