Kaspersky Lab challenges whitehats to find flaws in IoT devices, in Capture the Flag competition

The annual CTF competition is a contest in which ethical hackers (whitehats) test a virtual industrial environment for potential vulnerabilities, covering a broad range of cybersecurity issues. The event gathers the most talented whitehats from across the world to challenge their expertise with practical tasks. It is expected that a number of previously unknown vulnerabilities and attack vectors will be discovered during the competition.

The online qualifying rounds will be held on November 23-24, 2018. Participants will be asked to resolve different types of challenges, including problems on cryptography, reverse engineering, web-vulnerabilities, network protocols and other popular task categories. The CTF finals will be held at the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit (SAS) in Singapore in April 2019.

To ensure the competition represents a realistic environment, organizers will evaluate participants according to the actual difficulty of the tasks and uniqueness of the knowledge required to solve them. This is why the number of points awarded for each challenge will be determined in real time, changing according to the number of teams that have solved it. This means that the greater the number of teams that have completed a challenge, the fewer points will be awarded for that challenge, and vice versa. The top three teams with the highest scores will compete in the finals in April 2019 during the SAS event. All travel and accommodation expenses for the top three teams will be covered by Kaspersky Lab.

“We are surrounded by smart devices and rely on them in our everyday life more and more, while IoT malware grows and differentiates rapidly. This year’s competition could give us unique insights into the landscape of smart device security. To maximize the impact, we will try to make this year’s finals a bit different from previous ones, and the participants will face surprises, just like they would if they were trying to resolve cyberthreats in real life,” said Vladimir Dashchenko, Head of Vulnerability Research at Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT.

To participate in the Kaspersky Lab Capture the Flag (CTF) security competition, please register at ctf.kaspersky.com. Registration is open until November 24, 2018.