Syllabus for Round 1

• Topic 1: Cryptography
This topic introduces Cryptography, including encryption, hash techniques pitfalls, and its historical context. These concepts are of fundamental importance in laying the foundations of cybersecurity. Students will learn and experience adversarial thinking through examples, understand what cryptography can achieve, and become familiar with some common types of cryptography and its intriguing techniques.

• Topic 2: Networking Fundamentals
This topic introduces adversarial thinking in networks, network discovery through the Wireshark tool, and the Era of Digitalization. Students will also learn how to trace the network journey from the URL to a webpage, gaining an overview of the source page and exploring the functionalities of the Wireshark network tool.

• Topic 3: Red Teaming & Introduction to CTFs
This topic introduces the fundamental concepts of Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions and their many categories. In addition, students will become familiar with Linux operating systems, including basic commands, file permissions and processing, and how to install software and tools in a Linux environment. Furthermore, students will explore the programming languages commonly used to solve CTF challenges, supplemented with practical CTF demonstrations.

• Topic 4: Digital Forensics
This topic introduces Digital Forensics, covering the main stages of the digital forensics process, such as the identification, preservation, collection, examination, analysis, and presentation of digital evidence. Students will explore various types of digital evidence, such as Network Traffic Logs, Memory Dumps, Data Imaging, and File System Artifacts. Additionally, students will become familiar with the tools commonly used in forensic investigations. Hands-on exercises will provide practical experience in the application of
forensic techniques and tools in real-world scenarios.

                        Training Materials

Links to access NCL/NUS training materials:

Participants can refer to the NCL online training materials (pre-recorded basic training videos below), covering the following topics:

Latest Training Materials:

Basic Topics:

Additional Advanced Topics:

Online platforms such as TryHackMe, picoCTF, and Hack The Box can be used as demos in the training program. Participants can use these platforms to learn and practice on the real CTF environment.

Participants can refer to any other relevant training resources (not limited to NCL materials).

The online qualifier contest will be a 3-hour continuous open book CTF contest. The CTF questions for the qualifier will be set based on the above topics but not limited to. Students are encouraged to learn any concepts which will be helpful to take part in the online qualifier contest.

Prerequisite/Knowledge Requirements:

Python programming knowledge required:

  • Basic python programming knowledge about Comments, Variables, Data Types, Conditional Statement, Loop, file I/O, Operators, Conditional Statement, OOPs Concepts, Exception Handling, Collections.
  • Network library such as Requests, Socket, Scapy, Paramiko, Socket.IO, HTTPx, PyCurl.
  • Cryptography library such as SSL, Cryptography, PyCrypto, PyCryptodome, Hashlib, PyNaCl.
  • Library for penetration test such as Impacket, Python-nmap, Pwntools, BeautifulSoup.

C Programming knowledge required:

  • Basic C program Compilation Skills, Basic Syntax and Structure, Data Types and Memory, Control Structures, Functions, Pointers and Arrays, Strings, Memory Management.
  • File I/O, Bitwise Operations, Buffer Overflows, Structs and Typedefs, Assembly and System Calls, Debugging and Tools(optional).

 

Other References:

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