NSA will hold a 2022 Codebreaker Challenge Technical Talk online at 6:00pm ET on Thursday, September 1. You'll meet the team and get an overview of the challenge this year. Join the talk using this MS Teams link.
The annual NSA Codebreaker Challenge consists of a series of tasks for students that are worth a varying amount of points based on their difficulty. Schools are ranked according to the total number of points accumulated by their students. Solutions may be submitted at any time during the challenge, which ends early in January, 2023.
Each task in this year's challenge will require a range of skills. It starts with easy tasks but advances to harder ones, so it's a great learning experience even if you are know little about cybersecurity. To solve all of the tasks, you will need to call upon your technical expertise, your intuition, and your common sense.
Getting started is easy. Go to the challenge webpage, create an account and identify yourself as a student, instructor, or alumnus of UMBC. After you've verified your email address, you will get an invitation to join the Codebreaker Discord server. Joining will earn you (and UMBC) your first point!
As you work on the problems, you can track how UMBC is doing on the leaderboard. Of the more than 340 schools currently registered, UMBC is #2 in terms of the number of its participants, but only #45 in based on its score.