First edition of “Cy4games – Capture the Flag on trial”
On May 6, the first edition of “Cy4games – Capture the Flag on trial” was held in Rome, at the headquarters of Elettronica Group. Seventeen teams of ethical hackers from all over Italy attended the competition, promoted by Cy4gate and with the patronage of the Ministry of Defense. In this event, the Cyber Security group of the CNIT research unit of Rome Tor Vergata, had a fundamental role, having entirely realized either the software infrastructure as well as the security challenges proposed to the various teams. The technological infrastructure made it possible to carry out the competition in simultaneous Attack&Defense mode, i.e. with each team in charge to simultaneously attack the services of the other teams meanwhile defending their own. Participants have been further provided with a new custom-made dashboard, permitting each participant to monitor the status of the services and the score of the other participants, and trade hints with own scores. CNIT also ideated and designed the 5 challenges which were proposed to the teams involved in the competition. In addition to challenges tackling vulnerabilities at the system and information services level, competitors were also involved in a vulnerability challenge whose solution further required cryptographic attack techniques, as well as in a challenge focused on binary code reversing and applications’ exploitation.