INI Students and Alumni Propel Carnegie Mellon’s Hacking Team To Fourth Consecutive Win at DEF CON Capture-the-Flag Competition

For the fourth year in a row, the premier Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) hacking team, Plaid Parliament of Pwning (PPP), has claimed the top spot at this year’s DEF CON Capture-the-Flag (CTF) competition. This marks their ninth victory in 13 years. Information Networking Institute (INI) students and alumni have been prominent members of PPP and have been integral to the team’s success throughout the years. 

Once again, PPP was joined by the University of British Columbia Professor Robert Xiao’s team, Maple Bacon, along with CMU alumni, reforming the Maple Mallard Magistrates (MMM). 

“DEF CON CTF involves a lot of teamwork and communication,” said Erye Hernandez, a 2014 graduate of the M.S. in Information Security (MSIS) program. “Many of our veteran players have known each other for a long time, and it’s great having that camaraderie, trust, and ability to depend on each other when it comes to this type of competition.” Hernandez has a long history as a hackathon participant and a mentor who received the CMU College of Engineering Alumni Award for her mentorship. 

The team competed against 11 other teams, all of which qualified from a field of over 2,300 teams, in a three-day CTF widely considered the “Olympics” of hacking. As the number of cybersecurity attacks continues to increase worldwide, competitions like DEF CON’s CTF provide the opportunity for leading cybersecurity engineers to measure up against one another, learning and developing new techniques as they work through various challenges.  

MMM took an early lead in the competition but faced some adversity during the LiveCTF portion of the event, which narrowed the gap in the race to the top of the leaderboard heading into Sunday. The team ultimately rebounded to pull away from its closest challengers in the competition's final hours and secure the victory. For the win, the team earned eight black badges, the most elite recognition in hacking. 

“This was not my first attack/defense CTF, but coming into the DEF CON CTF Finals for the first time was an entirely different world for me,” said Rohil Chaudhry, a recent MSIS graduate. “The stakes are high, and I had a lot of fun experiencing the sheer pace with which the competitors work and learning new and interesting things from everyone on the team.” 

Also in attendance at DEF CON was INI alumn Keana Lucas. Lucas is a 2016 MSIS graduate, and at this year's conference, he gave a talk about Claude Artificial Intelligence (AI). A unique competitor in the CTF space, Claude AI has been competing in recent competitions, including CMU's very own picoCTF. The talk focused on the power of using an AI assistant and the unique limitations the technology currently faces.

INI students and alumni at DEF CON meetup

DEF CON is one of the largest hacking focused conferences and a valuable space for professionals to network and learn. Because of this, the INI regularly sponsors current students to attend the conference and connect with alumni and security professionals from all backgrounds. This year, the INI facilitated a meet-up hosted by Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor David Brumley along with Weijia Yan, M.S. in Information Technology – Information Security (MSIT-IS) alum, and Sam Dlinn, a graduate of the MSIS program.