A team from the Cryptography Research Center (CRC) demonstrated its cyber security prowess recently and bagged the sixth spot in the ‘Donjon CTF 2021: Capture the Fortress’ challenge that attracted 210 teams from around the world. The competition was a jeopardy CTF open to anyone, with more than 20 challenges close to problems encountered in real life. Most of them were independent from each other - covering standard categories such as cryptography, exploitation, reverse engineering, or side channel attacks.
Participants competed in security-themed challenges and “captured flags” to increase their scores. In these challenges, “flags" are secretly hidden in purposefully vulnerable programs or websites. Competitors steal flags either from other competitors (attack/defense-style CTFs) or from the organizers (jeopardy-style challenges). Ranging from hardware security to blockchain vulnerabilities, these challenges give participants a glimpse into the security research conducted by the Donjon team on a daily basis.
Team leader Santos Merino del Pozo, Principal Cryptographer, CRC said: “One of the main motivations for us to participate in the challenge was that it focused on crypto, so it was relevant to the Center. We were also attracted to the challenge as CRC has recently ramped up its hardware security lab and many of the challenges in this competition were related to this field. We were inspired to participate as we believe it will improve CRC’s visibility and hopefully attract more of the brightest minds in the domain to work here in Abu Dhabi with us.”
He added: “We recently hired more people, and it was a good exercise to understand the capabilities of the team as they are from diverse backgrounds – some from crypto and some with more experience in software security- so it was a good chance to all work together and I think the great community spirit in the lab as well as this incredible industry recognition are important takeaways that inspire us to achieve greater things in the future.”
As well as Santos, the team members who took part in the challenge were Victor Mateu, Principal Cryptographer, Jeroen Delvaux, Senior Hardware Security Researcher, Mario Romero, Senior Vulnerability Researcher, Jesus-Javier Chi-Dominguez, Senior Cryptographer Post-Quantum, and George Georgiev, Senior Hardware Security Researcher.
