Complexity of Cyber Defense Competitions Explained by K-State Veteran Team Members

By Mallory Pittman

The Kansas State Cyber Defense Team informed us about the rules of their competitions. We spoke with members of the blue team, graduate students Matt Webb and Chandan Chowdhury.  This team is in charge of defense. They have around one hour to lock everything down before the opposing red team comes in to break into the different systems. They are usually expected to secure things such as FTP servers, web servers, and more.

Three members of K-State's Cyber Defense Club
at the most recent CANSec competition.

Once the red team attempts to attack, the systems will be checked in time intervals of about five to fifteen minutes and the blue team will receive a point if a defended server is still up. Another twist is that “flags” are often hidden in servers. It is critical that these flags do not get compromised, or else the blue team suffers a significant loss of points.

The Central Networking and Security (CANSec) competition, the most recent competition they attended, has been held annually for 26 years. Cyber security as a whole emerged with the start of computers and the internet. About 25-30 years ago is when students started getting involved in the field and competitions arose.

In addition to their national competition that is held at Iowa State University, the team has also traveled to Little Rock, Arkansas and other cities, as the location of CANSec varies from year to year. The locations are usually not extremely far from Manhattan, Kansas, but the team would be eager to participate in competitions farther away if given the opportunity.

The entire team that went to the CANSec competition
held last month, which took place at Fontbonne
University in Clayton, Missouri.

Some of the competitions the team would like to attend are held in Las Vegas, but the team does not attend them due to reasons such as the cost and level of difficulty. The students are, however, planning on participating in a competition held in Colorado, hosted by the U.S. Air Force Academy, if budget allows.

Each competition includes different schools ranging from large universities similar to Kansas State to much smaller groups that come without uniforms. Because of this, and other factors that vary from competition to competition, it is hard to predict how the team will perform before they get there.

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