FORT MEADE, Md. - The National Security Agency (NSA) is launching its annual Codebreaker Challenge, offering students from U.S.-based academic institutions the opportunity to explore real-world scenarios emulating the Intelligence Community’s classified work and preparing them to tackle national security concerns after their graduation. Students will compete against other schools to complete mission-oriented tasks designed to build their skills in reverse engineering, vulnerability research, cryptography, programming/scripting, and more.
Now in its 11th year, the Codebreaker Challenge was launched in 2013 with five participating schools and has grown with each successive iteration. The 2023 challenge featured more than 5,000 participants from 450 academic institutions.
This year’s challenge is to discover nation-state advanced persistent threats that are targeting our defense industrial base contractors and stop them from infiltrating and sabotaging U.S. military operations.
Each of the seven tasks in the challenge is weighted with a certain number of points and increases in difficulty as students advance through the tasks. Once the challenge is complete, the points are awarded to the student’s school and the school with the most points wins.
Check out this year’s kick-off video, and register for the challenge at nsa-codebreaker.org.