BOMBE was the name of an electro-mechanical machine, developed during WWII by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, while working as codebreakers at Bletchley Park.
On September 9th the NSA will launch its fourth annual Codebreaker Challenge — a hands-on, software reverse engineering challenge in which students work to complete mission-focused objectives and push their university to the top of the competition leaderboard. UMBC did well, both individually and as a campus, in last year’s challenge. The theme of this year’s challenge is countering improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and students will be given six tasks of increasing difficulty, culminating in them developing a capability to permanently disable the IED software (in the fictional scenario.)
Feedback from previous iterations of the challenge indicated that students were able to learn a great deal from participating.
- The challenge will be hosted at https://codebreaker.Ltsnet.net.
- The challenge will begin on Sept. 9th at 9 PM ET, and will end on Dec. 31st at midnight.
- Students should register for the site using their .edu email addresses.
- The challenge website has nine lectures on reverse engineering, so students with little coding experience can participate.
Visit the 2016 Codebreaker Challenge site for more info and to register.