Our goals

  • Attracting new people. The interplay between attack and defense is central to security. By casting it as a high profile intellectual challenge, and by explicitly inviting under-represented groups, we stimulate the interest of bright students who might otherwise not have considered this career opportunity.
  • Building a community. The competitors who meet at C2C and the Inter-ACE when they are in their 20s will be the CISOs, the security directors and the police chiefs of tomorrow. In their future professional life they’ll be able to call up that smart intelligence analyst they became friends with at our events back in 2017.
  • Teaching it broadly. Participation in the competition is on a volunteer basis, but the teaching materials we develop for the competitors are then repurposed and introduced as practical exercises in the undergraduate curriculum available to all our students.

Participation

The competition is open to students studying at any Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research (ACE-CSR), including:

  • Imperial College
  • Lancaster University
  • Newcastle University
  • Queens University Belfast
  • Royal Holloway, University of London
  • University College London
  • University of Birmingham
  • University of Bristol
  • University of Cambridge
  • University of Kent
  • University of Oxford
  • University of Southampton
  • University of Surrey

Now preparing for its 3rd year, the Inter-ACE Cyber Challenge will return to Cambridge in 2018.