Taught learners at every stage

Growing students’ skills through hackathons

Hackathons, also known as codefests, offer students fun and exciting opportunities to design, innovate and build teamwork and hands-on technical skills in a fast-paced learning environment.

One regular offering is Devils Invent, a series of engineering and design challenges organized by ASU’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. The event pairs students with academic and industry mentors.

In 2020, students at the Devils Invent hackathon solved various challenges that drones may encounter in homeland security, including developing a countermeasure for an unmanned aerial vehicle threat to airport security or a stadium. In 2023, the hackathon challenged students to design effective responses to homeland security threats in “soft locations” like churches, museums, schools, stadiums and other public places. The 2024 event focused on solving cascading problems, when an unexpected event triggers a series of calamities. ASU students won first place in all categories and $42,000 cash.

At the 2024 DEF CON, the world’s largest hacker convention, the 25-person Shellphish team, composed of “hackademics” from ASU, Purdue University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, won the semifinal round of the DARPA AI Cyber Challenge, also known as AIxCC.

The Shellphish team collaborated on the development of an AI-based system called ARTIPHISHELL, which can automatically analyze the code that runs a piece of software, correct any security vulnerabilities found and then retest the system.

The AIxCC event was hosted by DARPA to spur the development of a cybersecurity system powered by artificial intelligence. Because of its desire to protect hospitals, pharmacies and medical devices from cyberattacks, the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, also collaborated on the competition and expanded the prize pool.

Drawing young learners into the cybersecurity field

The Global Security Initiative has ramped up initiatives to draw young people to work in a critical, understaffed field by training the next generation of cybersecurity professionals in grades K-12.

GSI’s Cybersecurity Education Consortium reached students in elementary and middle school, introducing them to core cybersecurity concepts, generating interest in the topic and working to create a pipeline of local talent. The consortium partnered with industry, local schools and other units at ASU to deliver cybersecurity content and training.

The consortium collaborated with ASU’s New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences to host the first GenCyber camp at ASU in 2021. Throughout the week, high school campers learned from a variety of presenters, including industry professionals, ASU faculty and cyber employees from the Arizona Department of Homeland Security.

To address the gender gap in cybersecurity roles, ASU’s West Valley campus hosted an event called CybersecurityDay4Girls in 2019. The event was hosted in partnership with IBM to introduce middle school girls to the field of cybersecurity.

CybersecurityDay4Girls covered topics to help middle school students and their families stay safe online in an ever more connected world. The program also introduced more advanced concepts like cryptography and blockchain, providing students with a better understanding of cybersecurity as a career and encouraging them to consider pursuing it further.

Training new cybersecurity professionals

While dangerous hackers are stealing our data and our dollars, Yan Shoshitaishvili, an associate professor of computer science and engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, has come to stop them. Shoshitaishvili plans to fill the jobs pipeline with a well-qualified, dedicated cybersecurity workforce that can beat the hackers at their game.

With his innovative project, pwn.college — a unique, distinct combination of an educational curriculum, a competitive practice environment and a set of communication tools to help students learn collaboratively — Shoshitaishvili has developed an effective system to train the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.

On the pwn.college site, cybersecurity students from around the world complete programming modules and participate in hacking exercises to gain real insight into how attackers access secured systems. Today, pwn.college is used in over 100 countries and is on the path to becoming the gold standard for cybersecurity training.

Creating a new national cybersecurity hub

ASU’s Center for Cybersecurity and Trusted Foundations, or CTF, was awarded a two-year, $4.5 million grant from DARPA to establish an institute that will educate future cybersecurity experts and address critical workforce shortages.

As part of GSI, the CTF team established the American Cybersecurity Education (ACE) Institute. The institute focuses on preparing current students for the toughest cybersecurity challenges and recruiting enough students to fill jobs in the future. One of its first steps was creating a master’s degree in cybersecurity offered by the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence.