CSAW Competition 2024
CSAW, established in 2003 and now the world’s most comprehensive student-run cybersecurity event, is celebrating its 21st year. It offers a robust platform for experiential learning and aims to motivate students to engage with and build careers in cybersecurity. Hosted by five global academic centers, CSAW presents a series of evolving cyber competitions designed to adapt to the rapidly changing threat landscape influenced by advancements in technologies like additive manufacturing, machine learning, and cloud-based AI. As the largest event of its kind, CSAW attracts the brightest minds from high school to doctoral levels, challenging them with diverse cybersecurity tasks and contributing significantly to the development of awareness, proficiency, and innovation in the cybersecurity field. CSAW'24 marks the 8th anniversary of CSAW Europe organized by Grenoble INP - Esisar in Valence, France.
Lea Salome Brugger, a former master’s student at TU Wien and now a PhD student at ETH Zürich, won 3rd place at the CSAW Applied Research Competition in cybersecurity. She presented the paper “CheckMate: Automated Game-Theoretic Security Reasoning,” co-authored with Laura Kovács, Anja Petković Komel, Sophie Rain, and Michael Rawson. CheckMate is an innovative framework designed to fully automate the analysis of game-theoretic security, particularly for blockchain technologies. It examines security protocols by modeling them as games to ensure incentive compatibility and resistance to Byzantine faults. This system not only suggests defensive strategies to secure protocols but also identifies potential vulnerabilities. In cases where protocols are not initially secure, CheckMate can determine the conditions needed to achieve security. It employs a rigorous method of game-theoretic security encoding in first-order linear real arithmetic, simplifying complex security analysis into solvable problems. Additionally, CheckMate efficiently manages the division of cases based on arithmetic terms. Testing has shown that CheckMate can scale up to handle extremely complex games, analyzing trillions of strategies, including those used in Bitcoin’s Lightning Network.
Earlier this year, Sophie Rain received the Best Presentation Award at LPAR-25 (Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Reasoning conference) for advanced work in scaling CheckMate.
