Three students from the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts in Hot Springs will compete at the New York University Cyber Security Awareness Week games, Nov. 12-14.
The students — seniors William Yang of Little Rock and Hayden Aud of Maumelle, and junior Martin Boerwinkle of El Dorado — will compete in the High School Forensics challenge for more than $450,000 in scholarships.
During the competition, the team will test their computer security skills to solve a murder mystery by analyzing electronic evidence to solve a fictitious crime that includes a financial element including Bitcoin. The teams will have six hours using a virtual machine with evidence from the victim’s cellphone to figure out the case, Boerwinkle said.
ASMSA is one of 10 teams from the United States and two from the United Arab Emirates competing in the games at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. A record 800 teams from across the world competed in the online preliminary round.
ASMSA finished for a tie in first place among 14 American teams and won a tiebreaker to earn their spot in New York. The team earned their national spot by completing a series of 10 cybersecurity challenges including cryptography, reverse engineering machine code to determine how it worked, a Web find information contest, digital forensics and others.
“There were multiple challenges, a bunch of small puzzles,” Boerwinkle said. “Part of the challenge was seeing who completed the tasks the fastest.”
While the students worked on the challenges as a team, each had some challenges where they played a more active role. Yang was particularly strong in the cryptography challenge while Aud knew Java for the Web challenge and Boerwinkle’s talent in the computer language C helped with the reverse engineering puzzle.
“But we collaborated a lot,” Yang said. “The most interesting and most difficult challenge was the reverse engineering one.”
The team solved all but two challenges in the preliminaries. They later found out the two challenges they were unable to complete did not have solutions.
Photo: Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts students William Yang, Martin Boerwinkle and Hayden Aud. Photo courtesy of ASMSA.