On February 27 and 28, 2004, a group of educators, students, government and industry representatives gathered in San Antonio, Texas, to discuss the feasibility and desirability of establishing regular cyber security exercises with a uniform structure for post-secondary level students.  During their discussions this group suggested the goals of creating a uniform structure for cyber security exercises might include the following:

 

1. Providing a template from which any educational institution can build a cyber security exercise
2. Providing enough structure to allow for competition among schools, regardless of size or resources
3. Motivating more educational institutions to offer students an opportunity to gain practical experience in information assurance

The group also identified concerns related to limiting participation to post-secondary students, creating a level playing field to eliminate possible advantages due to hardware and bandwidth differences, having a clear set of rules, implementing a fair and impartial scoring system, and addressing possible legal concerns.

In an effort to help facilitate the development of a regular, national level cyber security exercise, the Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security at the University of Texas at San Antonio agreed to host the first Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) for the Southwestern region in April of 2005.  While similar to other cyber defense competitions in many aspects, the CCDC is unique in that it focuses on the operational aspect of managing and protecting an existing network infrastructure.  While other exercises examine the abilities of a group of students to design, configure, and protect a network over the course of an entire semester, this competition is focused on the more operational task of assuming administrative and protective duties for an existing “commercial” network.  Teams are scored based on their ability to detect and respond to outside threats, maintain availability of existing services such as mail servers and web servers, respond to business requests such as the addition or removal of additional services, and balance security needs against business needs.

The Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security (CIAS) is a multidisciplinary research center within the College of Sciences (https://www.utsa.edu/sciences/) at The University of Texas at San Antonio (www.utsa.edu).  The CIAS has been a pioneer and global leader in cyber security competitions since 2005 with the creation and operation of the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, Panoply, eSentinel, Hivestorm, and ROTC-C3 competition programs.  The CIAS also co-founded and provides technology support for the Air Force Association’s CyberPatriot competition program.