HSE Students Among Top 10 Finalists of POC CTF
Five students from the HSE Tikhonov Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics (MIEM HSE) have ranked among the top ten finalists of the major cybersecurity competition POC CTF. The final, held in Seoul (Republic of Korea), brought together 50 students and professionals representing leading global companies and universities in the field of cybersecurity.
POC CTF is an annual international competition in South Korea organised as part of the Power of Community conference, which unites representatives of the global cybersecurity community. The contest consistently ranks among the top five individual-score competitions according to the CTFTime ranking platform.
Five first-year students of MIEM’s Information Security degree programme placed in the POC CTF top 10: Mikhail Ilyin (4th place), Aleksandr Vedenyapin (5th place), Maxim Nikitin (6th place), Maxim Kuskov (7th place), and Arseny Yakubovsky (10th place). The competition followed the CTF (capture the flag) format with individual scoring and a task-based set-up.
Mikhail Ilyin is also the Russian national champion in competitive programming in the Programming Information Security Systems category. He praised the high level of organisation at the international event: ‘The tasks were spread over two days. There were many interesting challenges that required an individual approach. The authors were always available and responded to all our questions. At the end of the event, all of us were invited to the final of Black Hat MEA in Saudi Arabia—the second-highest-ranked competition in the world, a dream destination for anyone active in CTF. We had an amazing time and made new connections in the international community.’
The POC CTF tasks covered cryptography, the exploitation of web and binary vulnerabilities, digital forensics, and reverse engineering (analysing application logic in order to bypass its normal operation).
One of the web-exploitation challenges modelled a typical vulnerability found in web applications, where participants had to detect the overwriting of critical files during server start-up. Using knowledge of Django project structures, the WSGI loading mechanism, and application server specifics, competitors needed to inject a short, safe payload capable of executing system commands and sending the result to an external OAST server. Such tasks remain highly relevant as they illustrate how subtle path-handling errors and file-system permission issues can lead to Remote Code Execution—one of the most critical and widespread vulnerabilities in real web systems.
The cryptography task was a standard side-channel attack analysis challenge—a power-analysis (CPA) attack on an AES-128 implementation. Using a set of power traces and known plaintexts, participants were required to reconstruct the secret encryption key, part of which (the beginning and the end) was provided in advance. The solution involved the Hamming model and basic statistical methods, particularly Pearson correlation. Such tasks demonstrate how even secure cryptographic algorithms can be compromised due to the specifics of their physical implementation—a crucial consideration when assessing the security of microcontrollers, hardware-encrypted boards, and IoT devices.
Another task in the PWN category (binary exploitation) involved using a vulnerability in a custom virtual machine with JIT compilation. Challenges of this type require a combination of reverse-engineering skills, an understanding of how JIT compilers work internally, and practical experience in low-level exploitation. This task is particularly relevant today, as complex interpreters and virtual machines—from JavaScript engines to smart-contract platforms—are increasingly common in real systems, and errors in them can lead to critical vulnerabilities.
Despite the intense competition schedule, our students still managed to explore the South Korean capital. ‘We essentially put together our own cultural programme—it turned out even better than I expected,’ said Arseny Yakubovsky. ‘In our free time we walked around Seoul, saw the local palaces, visited the city centre and a couple of markets, and tried all sorts of food: tteokbokki, Korean BBQ, street snacks—it was impossible to resist. Overall, even though we barely had any free time, it was busy and full of life. Seoul left a great impression—the city, the people, the atmosphere.’
All the students who took part in the final round of the competition teach at the newly established CTF Academy at MIEM—an initiative launched by MIEM students and faculty. Many members of the academy are winners and prize-winners of major Russian data-protection competitions.
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