UCI Advances to National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition
UC Irvine is headed to the final round of the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC), the largest college-level cyber defense competition in the nation. There are more than 160 universities competing every year, but only 10 make it to the final round. Eight team members — all students in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) and members of the Cyber@UCI cybersecurity club — will be in San Antonio, Texas on April 25 – 27 to compete against the best of the best.
“I’m excited to see the team compete at the national level again,” says Bryan Cunningham, Executive Director UCI’s Cybersecurity Policy and Research Institute (CPRI), which helps fund the team. “This competition, which simulates real-world situations in defending against cyberattacks, prepares students to excel when it comes to keeping today’s companies and organizations secure.” This will be UCI’s second National CCDC appearance, after competing in 2021.
“Getting into the national finals is a very significant achievement,” says Assistant Professor of Computer Science Alfred Chen, who serves as the team’s faculty advisor. “We’re in the Western Region, which is highly competitive!”
The Road to Finals
The competition starts with regionals, and there are nine regions across the U.S. Only the first-place winner in each region directly advances to the finals. All second-place winners then get another chance by competing in a “Wild Card” competition, where only the first place winner gets the last spot in the finals.
“This year, in the Western Region, we beat Stanford, the national CCDC champion last year, but lost to Cal Poly Pomona, the 2nd place team in last year’s finals,” says Chen. “We’re still headed to this year’s national competition as the first place winner of the Wild Card round though, like Cal Poly Pomona last year!”
Team co-captain Charles Wu, a senior majoring in computer science, stresses that the team has been working toward this moment ever since a disappointing finish in 2023. “Last year, we didn’t make it out of the qualifiers round… so I immediately started recruiting and training for this year!” With only three returning members, including co-captain Payton Erickson, he had his work cut out for him.
He launched an online summer training program with free resources and focused on building up the team’s offensive abilities. The team also got more connected with the cybersecurity community in Orange County. “Meeting more people in industry has definitely been a key invisible factor, because they were able to provide us with extra hardware for practice.” The team held weekly practices and conducted mock competitions throughout the fall.
Erickson, who graduated in winter 2024 with a B.S. in computer science, emphasized the importance of the mock competitions. “I focused on practicing how we compete, putting together a total of seven mock competitions to simulate the actual competition as closely as possible, including all the physical hardware we expected to see.” The team put in countless hours not only running through the practice competitions but also reviewing their performance.
“We ran things like a sports team,” explains Wu, “reviewing our game plan and identifying our strengths and weaknesses to better strategize.”
Teams are scored based on their ability to detect and respond to outside threats, maintain availability of existing services such as mail servers and web servers, respond to business requests, and balance security needs against business needs. Many of the NCCDC sponsors include the security teams of companies such as Cisco, Southwest Airlines and Walmart, so maintaining that balance is crucial.
“CCDC is an extremely applied competition. The attackers are people from the security industry, and they work hard to simulate their business scenarios,” says Wu. “Because of the insane amount of planning — and all the skills built around that planning — we were able to be extremely adaptable. Even though we had breaches during the competition, we were able to keep the business operational.”
First-year computer science major Akshay Rohatgi agrees. “I think that’s one of the core tenets of CCDC that we picked up on that helped us win. We had to trust our own knowledge and our ability to defend against threats.” He also credits the team’s hard work and dedication. “I don’t think I’ve ever been surrounded by such hardworking people. It’s pretty inspirational. That’s how we got to where we are today.”
Ready to Compete in NCCDC
First-year Ph.D. student Steven Ngo is thrilled to be a part of the team and moving on to the finals. “It has just been a wonderful community to get involved in. I’m very grateful to have made such friends, especially being new to Irvine.”
As the team now heads to Texas, they are up to the challenge.
“Going into Nationals, we feel way more prepared than when we first started out,” says Cara Failer, a senior software engineering major and the third returning team member. As she shared in a related LinkedIn post, “This road had so many late nights, took an insane amount of work, and at the end of the day, I am so incredibly proud every single member of our team…. We’ll make you proud at Nationals.”
If you are a current or incoming student interested in competing with the best of the best while acquiring industry-level cybersecurity skills, Cyber@UCI will be hosting a CCDC informational meeting on Tuesday April 23 at 5:30pm in DBH 3011.
— Shani Murray