Northrop Grumman Hosts 2nd Annual CyberEngineer Competition

This semester Northrop Grumman Corporation hosted its 2^nd annual CyberEngineer Competition for ACES students.

During the competition ACES students worked in five small groups to create functional inventions using Raspberry Pis.

Kevin Bock, George Hughey,Jake Ottenwaelder, Anurag Pradhan and Srujan Thotapally’s team took home the grand prize. The team created the Pina Colada, a Raspberry Pi that performs a wide range of attacks against a network.

George Hughey said, “By simply leaving the Pina Colada near a network, the Pi will connect to wifi networks, begin scanning, and call back to a central server so that the user can control it. Users control the device using Android app, web site, or command line interface to perform attacks.”

The second place team consisted of ACES students Grant Hoover, Mitchell Kager, Omkar Konaraddi, Anthony Li and Dhruv Mehta.

Grant Hoover said, “Our team created the PiPass, a 3-factor authentication password storage manager that allows users to securely store their login usernames and passwords for websites. Users can login after scanning their fingerprint and typing a single master password into a Google Chrome extension.”

Another participating team, composed of freshmen students Aidan Benderly, Kevin Chen, Nicholas Francino, Kenneth Jiang, Erik Ocho Martinez and Dante Stevens created a USB cleaner.

Team member Kevin Chen said, “We created a Raspberry Pi based USB secure file transfer device. It works by plugging in a potentially harmful USB with important files, and a second clean USB. Our device then scans for file types and copies clean/non-vulnerable files over to the new USB for retrieval. The goal was to reduce the billions of dollars lost from information loss from USB based malware, without risking a lost computer worth thousands of dollars to malware located on the USB.”

The fourth team, made up by Peter Yu, Alexandra Feggins, Evan Wolf, Dylan Fox Yeojun Yoon created an online file system.

Alexandra Feggins said, “For our project we made an online file system and every five minutes the login information such as name and time of login is backed up to the raspberry pi. This gives the user control of their information instead of having it stored on a large server owned by a commercial company.”

The final all-freshman team included Daniel Liscinsky, Sophie Jessel, Jasraj Singh, Johann Miller, Justin Frankle and Atharva Bhat.

Artharva Bhat said, “Our project was TerpSecure, a website that teaches users safe web browsing practices. The website is broken up into several different modules which teach users about a specific aspect of web safety. For example, one module shows users the strength of their online password, and suggestions to improve them. We built the website through a combination of HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP.”

Congratulations to all teams that participated in the CyberEngineer Competition!