Teenagers don’t often play a large role in solving murder mysteries, unless you’re talking about the fictional Hardy Boys or Veronica Mars. But three Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts students soon will have the opportunity to add their names to the list of young sleuths in New York City.
Seniors William Yang of Little Rock and Hayden Aud of Maumelle and junior Martin Boerwinkle of El Dorado will represent ASMSA in the New York University Cyber Security Awareness Week games on Nov. 12-14. They will compete in the High School Forensics challenge for a share of more than $450,000 in scholarships.
During the competition, the team will test their computer security skills to solve a murder mystery by analyzing electronic evidence to solve a fictitious crime that includes a financial element including Bitcoin. The teams will have six hours using a virtual machine with evidence from the victim’s cell phone to figure out the case, Boerwinkle said.
The ASMSA team is one of 10 teams from the United States and two from the United Arab Emirates who will compete in the games at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. A record 800 teams from across the world competed in the online preliminary round. The ASMSA team finished for a tie in first place among 14 American teams and won a tiebreaker to earn their spot in New York.
To earn their spot in the national finals, the team completed a series of 10 cybersecurity challenges including cryptography, reverse engineering machine code to determine how it worked, a Web find information contest, digital forensics and others. They were the ninth team to complete the preliminary challenges.
“There were multiple challenges, a bunch of small puzzles,” Boerwinkle said. “Part of the challenge was seeing who complete the tasks the fastest.”
The team spent an average of two and a half hours a day on weekdays working on the challenges, Boerwinkle said. Yang said he spent all day on weekends working on the challenges during the preliminary competition in September and early October.
While the students worked on the challenges as a team, each had some challenges where they played a more active role. Yang was particularly strong in the cryptography challenge while Aud knew Java for the Web challenge and Boerwinkle’s talent in the computer language C helped with the reverse engineering puzzle.
“But we collaborated a lot,” Yang said. “The most interesting and most difficult challenge was the reverse engineering one.”
“We definitely helped each other,” Aud said.
The team solved all but two challenges in the preliminaries. They later found out the two challenges they were unable to complete did not have solutions. Fourteen teams completed the challenges but only 10 could qualify for the finals. The teams had to submit a paper on how they completed a particular challenge. Judges used the report to determine the final 10 American teams.
The team was anxious as it waited for word on whether they made the finals. The scoreboard had been taken down and the results of the tiebreaker were posted at the time the team had been told they would be up.
“I was prepared for the worst,” Yang said. “They had never released the criteria for the report.”
“I was really excited when we found out. It was super cool because I didn’t think we were going to make it,” Boerwinkle said.
Yang, who competed in similar competitions last year as a junior, said one of the main rewards of going to the finals is the opportunity to interact with other contestants, including other high-schoolers he had chatted with online but not met in person who will be at the competition. It will also be a unique opportunity to interact with professionals in the technology center as well as college and university students and professors, he said.
Among the other competitors are teams from schools in California, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland and the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, an ASMSA peer institution.
To learn more about the completion, visit csaw.engineering.nyu.edu.