The 8th CTF Summer School ended on August 10. Taking part in it were 80 students from high schools and universities studying information security, members of Russian CTF teams, and experts on information protection, who shared their experience, learned new methods of information security programming and discussed the future of the Russian CTF movement.
The participants were divided into eight teams. Each team sought to win as many points as possible by completing everyday development and modeling tasks. In addition to the contest, the summer school curriculum included lectures and workshops.
The Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ, a partner of the CTF Summer School, held a hackathon on Universal Acceptance Readiness: the teams had to develop an app able to correctly accept, check, store, process, and display Cyrillic domains and email addresses (UA-ready) in less than 24 hours. In line with the hackathon objective, the app had to function as a system promptly alerting users about preventive measures for a new disease, the scale of its spread, and the vaccination schedule.
Maria Kolesnikova, the Coordination Center’s chief analyst and chair of the UA local initiative for the CIS and Eastern Europe, gave a detailed explanation of the task. Vadim Mikhailov, a technical expert at the Coordination Center, presented an introductory report on Universal Acceptance dedicated to the specifics of coding, the operation of IDN and EAI, the five principles of Universal Acceptance as well as other related topics.
Viktoria Bunchuk, the Coordination Center’s social projects manager, and Georgy Georgiyevsky, head of the Department for Relations with Registrars and Users, also worked with the participants: they gave advice on the app development, helped them to stay on schedule, and suggested better ways to present and defend their projects. The participants could also ask UA Ambassador Abdalmonem Galila from Egypt for advice on how to implement the UA principles.
After evaluating the code, compliance with the five UA principles, and project defenses, three winners were chosen:
- 1st place: Team Sinura: Its members developed a mobile app that can monitor body temperature and call a doctor in addition to giving prompt alerts about the threat of a new disease and prevention measures.
- 2nd place: Team Nautilus: They developed a web app that can provide users with individual recommendations on prevention measures and inform them about the vaccination schedule, including a consultation bot; the team also calculated the approximate cost of the project’s implementation.
- 3rd place: Team Micrasteriya: Its members developed a web app for a new disease alert system and even named it Infovir. The app’s simple and user-friendly interface is its main feature.
“The participants of the CTF Summer School’s hackathon showed a high level of engineering skills and managed to quickly implement their solutions, which reaffirms that very talented young IT experts live, study, and work in Russia, as well as the fact that introducing UA support for Cyrillic domains and email addresses to internet apps won’t take a lot of time and effort,” Maria Kolesnikova commented.
The Coordination Center prepared gifts for the winners of the hackathon: table games and useful devices good for leisure and education. All the summer school participants also received nice souvenirs with the Coordination Center emblem as well as Jovan Kurbalija’s book Internet Governance, published with the support of the Сenter.
The official site of the CTF Smmer School: letoctf.org.
