NSA: Codebreaker Challenge Helps Drive Cybersecurity Education

The US National Security Agency aims to attract students to cybersecurity in general and its own open positions in particular: 3,000 new jobs this year.

BLACK HAT USA – Las Vegas — Thursday, Aug. 10 —
According to the US National Security Agency (NSA), its cybersecurity outreach efforts with high school and college and university students has helped shape cyber curriculum in schools, as well as led to more students applying to work for the agency.
Rita Doerr, academic outreach lead at the NSAs cybersecurity directorate, here today said that the NSA has gone from being known as No Such Agency to now, where she regularly attends career fairs and
hiring events
and has to handle questions like what exactly does the NSA do?
We decided that we needed some unclassified way to explain what our NSA cyber analysts do on a daily basis, she said.
Doerr said hundreds of schools and universities have entered and participated in the
Codebreaker Challenge
, an event designed to provide participants with realistic challenges, including dealing with
ransomware
, reverse-engineering a
rogue mobile application
, and tracking surveillance footage. The Challenge also included the opportunity to use NSAs own
Ghidra reverse-engineering tool
, which the agency released at RSA Conference in 2019.
She said the skills developed in the 2022 challenge included forensics, binary reverse engineering, Web analysis and exploitation, cryptanalysis, and software development.
We wanted this challenge to be able to have folks showcase their current skills in cyber and computer science, and be able to learn and grasp new skills and challenges, Doerr said.
As a result of NSAs outreach, high school, middle school, and college students participated in the Codebreaker Challenge in 2022, which Doerr said was phenomenal since typically the Codebreaker Challenge attracts older participants and college students.
So high school students are becoming more tech-savvy, which is wonderful. Schools are suggesting that lessons learned in those skills — that the NSA is trying to hone in on — schools are making sure that they have requisite computer science and cyber courses, that cover those skills, she said. If not, they are creating special courses in those topic areas.
This years Codebreaker Challenge will center around a simulation in which the US Coast Guard identifies a signal about 30 miles off the coast of the continental US; participants will be asked to interpret and find the origin of the signal. The event will launch on Sept. 28 and end on Dec. 21.
The Codebreaker Challenge is no longer mainly a way of instructing college and university students about what NSA does, Doerr said. There are high school students and, as sure as Im standing here, probably some really tech-savvy middle school students who are participating, she said.
The Codebreaker Challenges are driving the cybersecurity computer science curriculum, which makes my heart happy, she said.
Hopefully that bodes well for building a skilled workforce: The NSA has a goal this year of
hiring 3,000 cybersecurity professionals
.

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NSA: Codebreaker Challenge Helps Drive Cybersecurity Education