IT Security students compete at Hackfest in Quebec City

Two groups of UOIT undergraduate and graduate students were the only Ontario university teams at Hackfest 2012, a two-day information technology (IT) security conference and competition held annually in Quebec City. Hackfest attracts more than 400 computer security enthusiasts and provides students and industry representatives with an ideal place to learn, share, discuss and contribute to the evolution of computer security.

The nine UOIT representatives gained valuable hands-on experience by attending various bilingual workshops and competitions, which exposed them to many emerging topics in IT security and enabled them to utilize and showcase the skills they have developed through their IT and Computer Science studies at UOIT.

Students competed in a risk-style cyber warfare game, competing against teams from Quebec universities and various professional IT security organizations. Non-team players acted as mercenaries, allowing them to sell secrets found while breaking into other team’s systems.

The second event pitted teams against a common target in a traditional

Capture the Flag-style competition. Various ‘flags’ were hidden among five different IT security categories:

• Cryptographic;
• Forensic analysis;
• Physical;
• Reverse engineering; and
• Web security.

UOIT students excelled in the physical and cryptographic challenges, successfully capturing nearly all of the physical flags and decrypting many of the other teams’ cyphers and hashes.

UOIT Team 1

• Garrett Hayes, Master of Science (MSc) student;
• Alex Keller, Bachelor of Information Technology (BIT) student;
• Titus Okathe, Master of Applied Science student;
• Akisanmi Oluwatoyosi, Master of Information Technology Security (MITS) student; and
• Geoff Vaughan, MITS student.

UOIT Team 2

• Chris Bonk, MSc student;
• Daniel Henricks, BIT student;
• Brent MacRae, BIT student; and
• Kee Song Yeoh, BIT student.

The UOIT students were able to attend Hackfest through the support of UOIT’s Faculty of Business and Information Technology, the Office of Graduate Studies and Advancement office.