California Cyber Innovation Challenge (CCIC)

The CCIC is a gamified and esports competition that uses space trivia and cybersecurity skills. An all digital game, middle and high school students work in teams to solve a space themed cybercrime.

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Inspiration

The Cal Poly California Cybersecurity Institute’s (CCI) annually hosts a collection of programs promoting early education opportunities to build a pipeline for future students interested in careers in technology. The California Cyber Innovation Challenge (CCIC) is the flagship game, designed by Cal Poly students, to help foster the middle school and high school student interest in cybersecurity and space.  

What it does

The CCIC is for middle and high school students—and future cyber professionals—to test their knowledge and experiences in digital forensics, cybersecurity, and space and satellite industry-specific systems through a unique gamified environment. The storyline for the game is that a cubesat has been breached, and the participants need to find out who did it.   Organized in teams, participants are provided approximately 80 hours of content in advance, providing them resources on different cybersecurity concepts and platforms, space trivia, as well as other applicable IT skills.   Once participants have had enough time to prepare, they are ready to compete. The game is designed around two verticals. The first is inside of Unity designed rooms, where participants explore eight distinct spaces and interact with clues and challenges to collect flags. The second is inside of a Windows instance that participants remote into and must complete more challenging analyses. Eventually, the collection of flags and challenges will provide clues to the participants on who committed the crime, and participants are required to guess ‘who did it.’  

How we built it

The CCIC is built by Cal Poly students, under the supervision of Henry Danielson, the CCI Technical Advisor. For the developers that made the game, they were trained and used a variety of cybersecurity and programming platforms, including AWS, Nvidia, Splunk, Fortinet, Unity development, networking, mobile forensics, Wireshark, Python, and STK. Developers are also taught how to map the game to the NICE framework, as well as the substantive nexus between space and cyber.   Non-developer Cal Poly students also aid in the game development as well. Students helped with storyline development, visual collateral, communication assets, as well as research and administrative support.  

Challenges we ran into

When the game is running for multiple teams, the difficulty is always providing enough technical support should there be any latency issues. We’ve addressed this partially through volunteers in addition to Cal Poly students. Volunteers came from Hackers from Above, DefCon Goons, as well as other cyber professionals.   Likewise, an ongoing challenge is running the game’s remote instances between different time zones.  

Accomplishments that we're proud of

To date, over 500 participants from middle and high school participated from around the world in the first version of this game in 2021. The CCI team is thrilled that through this game, participants’ awareness around the nexus of cyber and space was elevated, and the resources help both middle/high school students (as well as Cal Poly developers) be day-one ready for cyber opportunities.   CCI has since previewed this game for partners and peers and received accolades. Partners include the United States Space Force, Blacks in Cyber, the Greyhat Conference, and the Aerospace Village at DefCon.  

What we learned

The biggest lesson we’ve learned is the advantages afforded to the CCI team by making this competition fully virtual. In prior versions, there was a physical component of the game, capping the number of participants that could play. However, by building the Unity rooms and an all-digital environment, the CCIC is ready for audiences across the globe to play.   Another lesson for us are students in middle school can achieve a lot more than anticipated—meaning that the game’s next versions for years to come will have to be adapted to be more challenging and distinct to maintain participant interest.   Finally, we learned that to make this game more exciting, we will need to design a better scoring engine.  

What's next for California Cyber Innovation Challenge (CCIC)

The CCIC is going into two directions. On the immediate, the CCI is taking this game and rebuilding it for use with professional institutions and partners to showcase the power of gamified environments as a place to learn. For example, the CCI will be promoting and hosting this game at RSA for industry partners.   The second direction is building a new game—the Space Grand Challenge 2022. Taking the lessons from last year, the CCI team is building a new competition/game, to be launched on October 7 to 9, 2022. The storyline is similar, however there will be new room environments, completely new challenges, as well as a newer and more thorough scoring engine.  

Instructions for Gameplay

Advisory 1 When logging on, please choose to skip the "Account recovery requires verified contact information."   Advisory 2 Credentials give you access to Admin Tab. Please refrain from adjusting any settings.   Login credentials for gameplay are as follows: https://welcometocci2021.cacyber.net/   Username: demouser1@email.com Password: CyberSecurity1234!   Steps to begin:  

  1. Go to the second tab, ‘Pre-Qualifications.’ Please note, pre-qualification section is already complete for the User. However, users are encouraged review instructions for the different sections and enter the ‘(3) Practice Room Challenge’ to watch video and input a sample flag.  
  2. Click Home on navigation tab to review ‘Challenge Readme’  
  3. Click Locations on navigation tab. Users can explore any of the rooms to find flags. There are 8 distinct locations.  
  4. OPTIONAL: If of interest, Users are given the opportunity to log into a Windows Instance via remote desktop. Follow the read me on the remote desktop for a variety of challenges.   Advisory 3 Due to associated costs to run the Windows instance, this is a technical portion of the game and is not required. If user chooses to initiate instance, please email Henry Danielson, Technical Advisor, at hdaniels@calpoly.edu so to monitor.

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