Xiao Among CMU's Winning Codebreaker Challenge Team
News
HCII Ph.D. student Robert Xiao was one of three Carnegie Mellon University students to finish in the top 25 in the National Security Agency's Codebreaker Challenge.
Designed to encourage excitement and awareness of the problems the NSA faces, the Codebreaker Challenge presents participants with a fictitious scenario that creates a realistic backdrop for the contest. This year, codebreakers had to reverse engineer software used by a terrorist organization to communicate with its operatives and develop ways to exploit the program's secret messaging capabilities. The challenge involved four reverse-engineering tasks, each more difficult than and building upon the task before it.
More than 2,200 students from 300 academic institutions participated in the challenge, which ran from Sept.1 to Dec. 31, 2015. Xiao was joined in the top 25 by CMU students Corwin De Boor and Vishnu Prasanna Gorantla, leading Carnegie Mellon to a third-place finish overall.
Read the full story on the Cylab website.