BGU will host an elite corps of Israeli high school, college, and graduate students who advanced to the finals of the world's biggest student-led cybersecurity contest: the New York University Tandon School of Engineering's annual Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) games. The finals will take place in Israel November 12 and 13, 2017.
Among the events of the CSAW finals will be Capture the Flag (CTF), High School Forensics (HSF), and the Embedded Security Challenge (ESC). Last year CSAW expanded to include NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) and the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT Kanpur), one of the top universities for computer science education in India.
This year, CSAW expands even further, with new hubs at BGU and Valence, France, at Grenoble INP-Esisar, one of six engineering schools of the Grenoble Institute of Technology. In North America, India, France, and the United Arab Emirates, finals take place November 9 - 11, 2017. In Israel, finals take place November 12 and 13, 2017.
The launch of the CSAW in Israel is a joint initiative of BGU' s Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering, a center of research excellence in the field of Cyber Security, BGU's Cyber Security Research Center led by Prof. Yuval Elovici and IBM's Cyber Security Center of Excellence at BGU. BGU's Cyber Security Research Center's mission is to conduct innovative, applied cyber-security research. Researchers have extensive expertise in diverse research areas, such as machine learning, data mining and big data analysis, cryptography and privacy, secure hardware & physical layer security, anomaly detection, complex network analysis, artificial intelligence, computer network security and cloud computing security. This expertise builds on experience gained in numerous successful research projects dealing with cyber-security applications, such as fraud detection, Android security, data leakage prevention and malware detection, to name a few. Current research activity comprises twelve cyber-security research projects dealing with topics such as IoT security, cyber-attacks and their mitigation, security & privacy for cloud computing, physical layer security, and more.
The Israeli teams will play Capture The Flag, the flagship event of CSAW.
For the second consecutive year, the NYU Center for Cybersecurity will award scholarships to those who win first place in the CTF, ESC, or the Applied Research challenges at any of the five regional hubs and are admitted to NYU Tandon's highly competitive doctoral programs. Scholarships include full tuition and fellowships.
Capture The Flag
Players of all levels and ages from around the world registered for CTF, the flagship event of CSAW. After 48 hours of around-the-clock software hacking contests, a top-notch group of college students bested more than 2,400 teams — an estimated 10,000 players — from 95 countries to be finalists at one of the five global CSAW hubs. Ten teams from Israel advanced to the finals.
During the preliminary rounds of CTF, teams were presented with a series of real-world computer security challenges. As competitors advanced through the challenges, they earned points, or “flags," with winners qualifying for cash prizes, bragging rights, and travel awards to compete at the finals. CTFs are not only essential training for students and cybersecurity professionals, they are also a way to introduce young people worldwide to the field and entice them to pursue information security careers.
View teams competing at the CSAW finals in all five regions.
