#Defcon competition software#
#Defcon competition code#

The creative ability to respond to a new situation is just one of the skills tested in a CTF contest. Every tool we had written in preparation for the competition had to be changed in that 24 hours beforehand to make it compatible with this weird structure.' 'It had 9-bit bytes instead of 8-bit bytes, and it used an unusual middle-endian byte-storage scheme so the way numbers were parsed had to be completely modified. 'The architecture was specifically built so that it wouldn't work with tools that are made for a normal computer,' said Lab RATs member Christine Fossaceca.

#Defcon competition software#

Ironically named cLEMENCy, the architecture showed no mercy to the finalist teams, who were forced to scrap the cybersecurity techniques they knew to develop new software tools on the fly. 'Just 24 hours before the competition, we were given a 75-page book explaining the never-before-seen computer architecture that our system would be using,' Fasano says.

The Legitimate Business Syndicate, organizer of the 2017 CTF and a previous competitor at DEF CON CTF finals, was on its last year of a multiyear contract to devise the game and was determined to make their swan song an extreme challenge. This year's DEF CON CTF competition was a humdinger, Fasano says. 'You have to develop the tools and mindset to attack and defend computer systems in a high-pressure environment.' 'Participation in DEF CON CTF is realistic cybersecurity training,' says Lab RATs captain Andrew Fasano of the laboratory's Cyber System Assessments Group. The team meets and practices during non-work hours at the Beaver Works facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and membership fluctuates between 20-30 laboratory employees and six to eight MIT students. This was the first year Lab RATS qualified for the finals of the competition, which they have entered for the past three years. This year's CTF was held in Las Vegas, and was part of the annual DEF CON hackers' convention, which attracts not only amateur codebreakers but also cybersecurity professionals from academia, governments, and businesses worldwide. Teams chosen for the coveted finals slots emerged from more than 4,000 entrants who competed in qualifying events.

Because DEF CON CTF is an attack-and-defend tournament, competitors not only had to infiltrate opponents' systems to steal flags and earn points, they also accrued points by keeping their own services up and running against the onslaught of 14 other teams who came to DEF CON from Germany, Israel, Russia, China, Korea, and Hungary, as well as elsewhere in the U.S.Īfter the 52-hour contest was over, the Lab RATs had earned 10th place among the 15 teams that had qualified for the finals of DEF CON CTF, the world's premier hacking competition.

#Defcon competition code#

The laboratory's cyber researchers and analysts, joined by students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and MIT, were pitted against other elite teams trying to breach each other's computers and capture 'flags' - which are actually code strings - embedded within the programming. Battling teams from around the world, a team of staff members from MIT Lincoln Laboratory's Cyber Security and Information Sciences Division and Information Services Department made it all the way to the finals of this year's DEF CON Capture the Flag (CTF) hacking competition. They call themselves Lab RATs, in a nod to remote access trojans, which are malware that attempt to hijack a computer's operations.