Carnegie Mellon Sweeps Microsoft Build the Shield Competition

Jessica Corry Tuesday, May 24, 2016

A team of SCS students took first place in Microsoft's Build the Shield competition earlier this spring.

A team of students from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science took first place in Microsoft's Build the Shield competition earlier this spring.

The event, which drew 47 teams to Microsoft's Redmond campus, combined two types of capture-the-flag (CTF) competitions: live attack-defense and jeopardy. Teams were assigned a country’s tourism department and charged with defending a server running vulnerable software and web services. Each team worked to discover and patch its own vulnerabilities while developing exploits to use against other teams. They also completed offline security puzzles in forensics, cryptography and web application security.

"As security increasingly becomes top-of-mind for organizations around the world, Microsoft is focused on advancing the ways in which companies identify weaknesses and protect against cyber threats,” said Brian Fielder, principal engineering manager at Microsoft. "Through our Build the Shield events, we bring together future security leaders to solve real-world problems. This year's Carnegie Mellon teams demonstrated the levels of passion and innovation that are necessary to accelerate security and protect against malicious actors."

At the end of the day, CMU's PPP2 team took first place. Winners included rising computer science senior Noah Goetz, Human-Computer Interaction Institute Ph.D. student Robert Xiao, and recent grads Hemanth Kini and Brandon Lum. Computer science Ph.D. student Dominic Chen belonged to the second-place CMU team, which also included students from the College of Engineering and Software Engineering Institute.

"We're thrilled with this result, and we think the strong placement of all Carnegie Mellon teams reflects the commitment and passion that the university has for the field of computer security," Xiao said.

For more information and a full list of CMU's winners, read the feature story on the Information Networking Institute's website.

For More Information

Byron Spice | 412-268-9068 | bspice@cs.cmu.edu