In an academic trip sponsored by Margin of excellence gift funds provided through the Cyber Research Center (CRC) NSA Cyberspace Exercise (NCX) endowment, 36 cadets attended a virtual NCX cybersecurity competition at the U.S. Military Academy April 8-10.
The cadets competed in five events that focused on offensive and defensive cyber operations, incident response, digital forensics, strategic policies in cyberspace, reverse engineering, cryptography, and active cyber defense and response.
Participants included members of West Point’s Cadet Competitive Cyber Team (C3T), Cyber Policy Team, as well as cadets from the Cyber-Tech Team across multiple departments, to include 14 unique academic majors.
The C3T team finished in second place in the 12-team, nine-school competition with the U.S. Naval Academy earning the top spot.
The first component of the event consisted of the digital forensics module. Teams determined the nature and severity of an attack that had already occurred through the examination of evidence using forensic techniques to determine the vector, target and actor of a compromise.
The second component of the event consisted of the cyber policy module. During this portion, Cyber Policy Teams adopted the standard lexicon used by U.S. policy makers. They were tested on applicable laws, treaties, and norms in an operational environment, considering relationships and interconnected systems at work in the cyberspace environment and geographical regions in question.
The third component of the event consisted of the cryptography module. This module challenged the team’s ability to analyze cryptographic applications to identify and exploit flaws, including ciphers, public-key encryption, hash functions, homomorphic encryption, elliptic curves, zero-knowledge proofs and novel cryptography.
The fourth component of the event consisted of the reverse engineering module. The teams analyze hardware, software, protocols, malware and assembly code from various programming languages to find flaws and unlock features.
The fifth component of the event consisted of a comprehensive cyber combat exercise where teams competed in active offensive and defensive cyber operations. The service academy teams acted as newly deployed Cyber Mission Forces (CMF) and surged to defend a fictional country’s infrastructure. Each CMF team defended against sophisticated threat actors (the other teams), while actively seeking to deny and degrade the adversary’s initiative to intercept free and open elections, ultimately keeping foreign adversaries from meddling in the democratic processes.
After the annual NSA NCX, it concluded with a virtual award presentation from Gen. Paul Nakasone, commander of U.S. Cyber Command, director of the National Security Agency and chief of the Central Security Service.