As 'Joannatron,' a Team of INI Students Make Top Five in 2024 IEEE Capture-the-Flag Competition

INI students Tyler McCampbell, John Samuels, Kiranbaskar Velmurugan and Rohan Viswanathan pose in their custom Joannatron T-shirts.

A team of students in the Information Networking Institute (INI) Master of Science in Information Security (MSIS) program joined forces under a unique banner to compete in the University of North Dakota (UND) CyberHawks National CTF qualifiers. Taylor McCampbell, John Samuels, Kiranbaskar Velmurugan and Rohan Viswanathan took their team, Joannatron, to first place in the qualifiers and the top five at the final competition during the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Cyber Security and Research Symposium (CARS) on October 28, 2024.

Capture-the-Flag (CTF) competitions let participants test their cybersecurity skills in a competitive environment. Individuals or teams compete to solve challenges, gaining points for each success. Challenges can require a broad category of skills (Binary Exploitation, Reverse Engineering, Forensics, etc.) and involve intentional vulnerabilities that need to be exploited to win. 

The team’s name is inspired by INI Associate Professor of the Practice Joanne Peca.  

“We tried to think of defining characters and elements of the INI, and Joanne came up,” Samuels explained. “We put Joanne, along with our other ideas, into a band name generator, and it gave us ‘Joannatron.’ When we first said it out loud, we unanimously decided that was going to be the name. Thanks, Joanne!” 

CTFs like this give students the chance to hone the skills they are learning in the classroom. Often, these competitions are modeled after recently discovered vulnerabilities, giving participants the opportunity to develop their problem-solving techniques.  

“One of the biggest skills that one develops by participating in CTFs is the efficient usage of tools to solve a problem,” said Velmurugan. “I definitely felt like I improved my Web Exploitation skills. We sat in a Discord call and solved a web challenge within an hour that no other team was able to solve by the end of the CTF.”  

CTFs also give participants the opportunity to build their complementary skills, like teamwork and creative problem solving.  

“The INI taught me how to persevere through tough problems and think differently about the challenge at hand, which is incredibly useful in a competition like this,” said Viswanathan. 

For those students interested in jumping into the world of CTF competition, the team was unanimous in their advice: the best thing to do is dive in and start competing. For Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) students, there’s no better way to jump in than by attending a meeting of the Plaid Parliament of Pwning (PPP). PPP is CMU’s award-winning CTF team that has taken home the gold at DEF CON for the past three years, with a total of eight wins at DEF CON over all.