CSAW: RESULTS

The 14th annual New York University Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) games – already the world’s largest and most comprehensive set of student-led security challenges – closed on Monday, November 13, in the last of five countries, setting records and surprises.

For the first time, the CSAW finals expanded to include students from across Europe hosted by Grenoble INP-Esisar, in Valence, France – one of six engineering schools of the Grenoble Institute of Technology – and Israeli students hosted by Ben-Gurion University in the new Advanced Technology Park in the Negev, Israel. CSAW Israel is organized by BGU’s Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering and the IBM Cyber Security Center of Excellence, located in Ben-Gurion University.
The schools joined NYU Abu Dhabi,  which hosted finalists from the Middle East and North Africa; the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT Kanpur), with which NYU Tandon has multiple partnerships and which attracts competitors to CSAW from all over India and, in the future, large parts of Asia; and CSAW founding institution NYU Tandon School of Engineering in Brooklyn.

More than 400 elite students from high school through doctoral programs who had beaten over 12,000 participants from 98 countries in preliminary rounds gathered at four of the regional hubs November 9-11, 2017; in Israel, the CSAW finals ran November 12-13.
All international results are available on:  https://csaw.engineering.nyu.edu/csaw17-winners

CSAW was founded in 2003 not simply to engage and educate students but to introduce them to leading professionals and peers who would be able to form important networks when they would become professionals and academics themselves. The 2017  CSAW Europe was no exception, besides the competitions, including the four student challenges, Grenoble INP-Esisar hosted an industry career fair, speeches, and networking events.
The European finals comprised 4 hotly contested competitions among 80 students and 35 teams, supported by over 20 judges from academia and industry. Nearly 30 corporate and government employers from Schneider Electric, Ingenico, Serma Safety and Security, Thales, IP Garde and Ponant Technologies participate to recruit CSAW finalists and other Auvergne-Rhone Alpes area  cybersecurity students for internships and career positions.

In the High School Forensics competition, the young cyber sleuths tried to solve a murder mystery using digital clues. Altogether, a record 600 high school teams competed in CSAW preliminaries and 30 teams competed on site at three regional CSAW hubs.
 

Players of all levels and ages registered for CTF, the flagship event of CSAW. After 48 hours of around-the-clock software hacking contests in September, a top-notch group of students bested nearly 2,400 teams from 95 countries to become finalists at the five global CSAW hubs. For 24 straight hours, 10 European teams competed in the infamously difficult student CTF final competition. CTFs are considered essential training for students and cybersecurity professionals.

First Place – Eat sleep pwn repeat, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, Victor Pfautz, Edgar Boda-Majer, Samuel Groß, Niklas Baumstark

Second Place – NOPS, EURECOM, France, Emanuele Cozzi, Fabio Pagani, Marius Münch, Sebastian Pöplau

Third Place – Tower of Hanoi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy, Andrea Jegher, Pietro Ferretti, Filippo Cremonese, Marco Festa

The CSAW HSF challenge introduces high school-age novices to the cybersecurity field, attracting students who enjoy solving puzzles and encouraging newcomers to solve a fictional murder mystery using their digital skills. The students were challenged to find clues in physical and digital evidence to unmask the identities of a murdering hacking squad.

First Place –     Kiwi – Lycée Guillaume Fichet, Bonneville,  Tom Niget, Léo Joly, Maxime Bouchenoua, Mentor: David Roche
Second Place – Brifforce – Lycée Algoud Laffemas, Valence     Mehdy FOURNIER, Jean Zablocki, Clara    LAVILLE Mentor : Heloïse Martin
Third Place – TED - Institut Notre Dame, Valence, Théo    BROCHARD, Enzo    CONTE, Denis    MAURIN, Mentor : Gerald Perminjat

Founded in 2008, the Embedded Security Challenge — the oldest and largest hardware hacking competition in the world and the most difficult event at CSAW — contributes to worldwide scholarship in the emerging field.  The tournament employs a “red team, blue team” format that mimics real-world attacks. This year’s challenge, developed in partnership with the U.S. Office of Naval Research, required competitors to make programmable logic controllers more resilient to cybersecurity threats by employing novel fault detection and recovery techniques. Teams demonstrated their solutions on Raspberry Pi microchip platforms. The judging was difficult: only a half-point separated the top two contenders Esisar and INSA Val de Loire.

First Place –Esisar, Grenoble INP-Esisar France, BENMOULAY Reda, MAHE Claire , LAPEYRE Sebastien, ROSINSKI Maxime, Team Advisor: Cyril Bresch
 

Second Place –INSA’Hack, INSA CVL France : VIGNAU Benjamin,  MACE Lorin, RONTEIX--JACQUET Flavien , KAWALEC Joseph, team advisor BRIFFAUT Jérémy

Third Place –Les pentesteurs de l'extrême, INSA CVL France: BOYER Martin, DURAND Killian, BELAIR Maxime, COLONEL Pierre-henri, team advisor :  BRIFFAUT Jérémy

Recognized as the leading competition for young cybersecurity researchers, the Applied Research Competition considers only peer-reviewed security papers that have already been accepted by scholarly journals and conferences. This year, top academics and practitioners in the field reviewed a record 170 papers to arrive at the list of finalists. During the CSAW final round, one of the student authors of each paper presented their research to judges, who reported a particularly difficult selection because of the impact they expect the research will have both immediately and in the future.

First Place -    Shahin Tajik, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
On the Power of Optical Contactless Probing: Attacking Bitstream Encryption of FPGAs. Tajik, Shahin & Lohrke, Heiko & Seifert, Jean-Pierre & Boit, Christian.    

Second Place – Enrico Mariconti, Dept. of Computer Science, University College London, United Kingdom
MaMaDroid: Detecting Android Malware by Building Markov Chains of Behavioral Models, Enrico Mariconti, Lucky Onwuzurike, Panagiotis Andriotis, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Gordon Ross, Gianluca Stringhini

Third Place – Omid Mirzaei, Computer Security Lab, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Madrid, Spain
TriFlow: Triaging Android Applications using Speculative Information Flows, Omid Mirzaei, Guillermo Suarez-Tangil, Juan Tapiador, and Jose M. de Fuentes