IIT Roorkee students shine by securing top positions

A team of students at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee has won the Embedded Security Challenge in the virtual hardware hackathon organized at IIT Kanpur. The winning team was awarded a cash prize of INR 50,000. Titled Cybersecurity Awareness Worldwide 2020, the competition is among the oldest hackathon in the world. It featured nine contests related to cybersecurity that witnessed the participation of 1225 students from 90 countries. The objective of the competition was to disseminate awareness of the significance of cybersecurity.

The winning team comprised four members- Kanav Gupta, B.Tech. IV Year, Computer Science Engineering, Manas Chaudhary, B.Tech. III Year, Mechanical Engineering, Adrij Shikhar,B.Tech. III Year, Polymer Science and Engineering and Gaurav Genani,B.Tech. II Year, Chemical Engineering. Basis the total points accumulated, the team stood 1st in India and 3rd in the world.

“We were given a series of binaries that run on a Risc-V board. We were required to understand to reverse the binaries and understand their working. We discovered vulnerabilities in their functioning and crafted exploits to solve the challenges. For each successfully solved challenge, we received a string called “flag” and turning them in gave us points. There was also a time-bound live challenge us after the presentation event, and we successfully solved that within the time limit, getting the 2nd fastest solve in the world” said Kanav Gupta, Computer Science Engineering – B.Tech. IV Year student at IIT Roorkee who had led the team.

“I would like to congratulate the IIT Roorkee team for winning the Embedded Security Challenge at Cybersecurity Awareness Worldwide 2020. The event provides a platform for students across the world to showcase their proficiency and innovation in this important area” said Prof. Ajit K. Chaturvedi, Director, IIT Roorkee.

The team plans to utilise the winning amount to buy more equipment to be instrumental in experimentation as the hardware hacking gets very niche. They also have plans to buy raspberry pis, gameboys and other hardwares to experiment on.

In this competition, the two teams from IIT Roorkee i.e. Infosec IITR and SDS Labs participated in Capture the Flag (CTF) challenge. The competition witnessed the participation from the best CTF teams from India, North America, Europe and MENA selected by a pre-qualifying round. Infosec IITR and SDS Labs performed tremendously in the challenge and secured 2nd position and 5th position in India respectively. Globally, Infosec IITR stood at 14th position while SDS secured 22nd position.

The competition was related to ethical hacking and the team solved challenges related to web/network exploitation, cryptography, binary hacking, reverse engineering and other general computer science problems. Infosec IITR team comprised of Rishi Ranjan and Shubhang Tripathi of CSE 3rd year, Abhinav Saini of CSE 2nd year and Mohit Sharma of Engineering Physics 3rd year. SDS Labs team consisted Supratik Das and Piyush Sethia of ECE 4th year, Manas Chaudhary  of 3rd year Mech, and Meet Shah of 2nd year CSE.