C3i Lab, IIT Kanpur hosts India leg of Cybersecurity Awareness Worldwide Final

Kanpur: Students of Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India Institute of Technology Roorkee, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Indian Institute of Technology Dharwad and Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham bagged the top honours in the Indian leg of CSAW (Cybersecurity Awareness Worldwide) the most comprehensive student-run cyber security event in the world.

The Indian leg organised by C3i Center (Cybersecurity Center), IIT Kanpur witnessed three competitions namely ‘Catch The Flag’, ‘Embedded Security Challenge’ & ‘Applied Research’ under the supervision of Prof. Sandeep Shukla, Computer Science & Engineering Department and Director C3i (Cybersecurity Center). This year the event was conducted virtually in real time simultaneously in its 6 global regions through its New York Center between 6th-8th November, 2020. This year’s event was sponsored by companies like IBM, Twitter, DTCC, Bank of America, among others.

ByteBandits from the IIT Roorkee bagged the first spot in India and the 8th spot ( worldwide) in the Hacking marathon competition held virtually as a part of the ‘Catch the Flag ‘competition. While ‘InfoSecIITR’, the IIT Roorkee team earned the second spot in India and 14th spot in the competition conducted worldwide and team ‘biOs’ from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham earned the 3rd spot in India and the 16th spot (worldwide). The teams were under the able supervision of Mridul Chamoli, IITK, C3i Center.
This year the Embedded Security Challenge (ESD) was focused on the protection of Internet of Things (IoT), the device that is embedded with the network connectivity. IoT device is connected approximately more than 20 million IoT devices and is a part of an indefinite modern smart infrastructure. The participants had to utilize the ESC 2020 open source engineering tool to hack into access point of the WiFi available on the RISC-V IoT platform. SDS Labs, IIT Roorkee grabbed the first spot while Team SEAL, IIT Kharagpur & TheHackingCompany from IIT Dharwad earned the second & third spot respectively in India. The teams were guided by Rohit Negi, IITK, C3i Center.

Under the Applied Research Competition (ARC), participants are required to submit their research papers which had adhere to various criteria’s such as originality, industry relevance and accuracy. There were three research papers all from IIT Madras that were unanimously elected. Gargi Mitra earned the first position while Patanjali SLPSK & Keerthi K earned the second & third position respectively. They were under the able guidance of Anand Handa, IITK, C3i Center.