Attack/Defend computer security contests require participants to leverage knowledge obtained from a variety of courses across a computer science curriculum, providing undergraduates with a novel and exciting opportunity to challenge both themselves and their peers. However, there are limited opportunities to participate in such contests and none of them is well suited for novices in computer security.   This paper describes the design of an Attack/Defend security contest that is geared towards undergraduates who have little exposure to computer security and require a more gentle introduction. We provide implementation details of the framework that supports this contest and offer lessons learned over the past three years in growing our contest into an intercollegiate event that is deployed on a cloud infrastructure to support multiple, concurrently operating contest sites which span three timezones.
['Nathan Backman']
Facilitating a Battle Between Hackers: Computer Security Outside of the Classroom