USC Aiken's Cyber Whiz Wins Security Challenge

AIKEN, SC (08/21/2018) For two years running, an information specialist from the University of South Carolina Aiken has taken a regional crypto challenge and successfully broken the code.

Putting his super-sleuth cybersecurity skills to work, Chris Clark has successfully decoded encrypted messages during the annual CarolinaCon conference in Raleigh, N.C.

"I enjoy attending various hacker and information security conferences, and CarolinaCon has become one of my recent favorites," said Clark.

In addition to the schedule of presentations given during the conference, several different contest events are held to provide challenges which test the skills and knowledge of attendees, like Clark. Friendly security challenges include: a lock-picking contest, a hacking contest, and the crypto challenge, which involves cryptographic code breaking.

The crypto challenge typically runs through the duration of the conference. Participants in the crypto challenge are provided with encrypted text, which can either be a "starter" statement or the entire challenge series.

The participant must decrypt the text in order to progress to the next encrypted text in the series. Once all of the challenge statements have been decrypted, the participant meets with the challenge organizer, states that the challenge has been completed, and then demonstrates that all text statements have been decrypted and how the participant decrypted them.

Whoever does all this first wins the challenge. And, for the last two years, that's been Clark.

"All I know is that he asked if he could go to this conference. We agreed that it would be good for him to go learn more skills, but obviously he was one of the brightest crypto crackers attending," said Joann L. Williamson, director of Network Systems, Architecture, and Infrastructure at USC Aiken.

Posted Tuesday August 21, 2018 at 07:03 am by USC Aiken
Last Updated Tuesday August 21, 2018 at 07:03 am