CYLAB SECURITY ACADEMY
About CyLab Security Academy
A free cybersecurity education program created by security experts at Carnegie Mellon University built around hands-on Capture the Flag challenges.
Putting education ahead of competition
The largest high school hacking competition now provides year-round cybersecurity learning. CyLab Security Academy is the next chapter of a cybersecurity education platform built by the team at Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab Security and Privacy Institute. What started as a competition has grown into a full learning ecosystem serving over a million learners across 14,000 classrooms worldwide.
Our research
Big learning, small challenges. If we cannot make learning cybersecurity easy, then we will make it fun.
Selected past papers:
- pico-Boo!: How to avoid scaring students away in a CTF competition (2019)
- Automatic Problem Generation for Capture-the-Flag Competitions (2015)
- picoCTF: A Game-Based Computer Security Competition for High School Students (2014)
- picoCTF: Teaching 10,000 High School Students to Hack (2013)
- picoCTF 2013 — Toaster Wars: When interactive storytelling game meets the largest computer security competition (2013)
Who we are
Program
- Megan Kearns — Program Director
- Ivan Liang — Research Programmer, Game/UX Lead
- Luke Jones — Software Engineer, Education Lead
Faculty advisors
- Lorrie Cranor — CyLab Director
- Hanan Hibshi — Research Advisor
Carnegie Mellon University
- Michael Cunningham — Communications Lead
- Michael Lisanti — Sponsorship Lead
- Jason Griess — Sponsorships
- Isabelle Glassmith — Sponsorships
- Danyel Kusbit — Sponsorships
- Weijia Yan — Outreach
- Jiin Jeong — Outreach
- Ariana Mims — Education Dev
- Pavani Mogili — Education Dev
- Jay Bosamiya — Problem Writer
- Palash Oswal — Problem Writer
- Josh Inscoe — Problem Writer
- Robert Chen — Problem Writer
- Will Hong — Problem Writer
- Geoffrey Njogu — Problem Writer
- Mubarak Mikail — Problem Writer
- Neel Bhavsar — Problem Writer
- Anish Singhani — Problem Writer
- Zach Wade — Alumni, Problem Writer
- Jeffery John — Problem Writer