CYLAB SECURITY ACADEMY

NSA GenCyber

An in-person summer camp at Carnegie Mellon for U.S. high-school computer science teachers — bring cybersecurity Capture-the-Flag content into your classroom.

In-person summer camp for teachers

Carnegie Mellon University hosted an NSA GenCyber experience for high school teachers in June 2024. Stipends are provided for teachers attending all five days of camp.

The CyLab Security Academy for GenCyber Teacher Program is designed for U.S. high-school computer science teachers interested in using online cybersecurity Capture-the-Flag (CTF) problems and competitions to introduce cybersecurity knowledge and skills to their students, and to grow student interest in cybersecurity careers.

Program objectives

  1. Provide free education on cybersecurity knowledge and skills typically taught at the Bachelor’s/Master’s level — e.g. cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks and their defenses — so participants feel comfortable bringing our content into their classrooms.
  2. Show how all six GenCyber Cybersecurity Concepts and cyber ethics manifest in the design of secure computer systems, the practice of real-world cybersecurity professionals, and the cyber-computing experience in our everyday lives.
  3. Collaborate with our K–12 pedagogical expert and teachers to identify a set of curriculum integration points where the knowledge above can be synergistically inserted into existing high-school computer science curriculums.
  4. Customize a set of demonstration lesson plans on how to use CTF problems and competitions to excite students to learn cybersecurity knowledge and skills, and to increase their interest in cybersecurity careers.

Online lectures

Lectures on introductory-level cybersecurity principles are recorded and posted on the picoCTF YouTube channel, leveraging picoCTF content. New lectures are released monthly, with Q&A sessions on Twitter for each topic.

Lecture 1: General Skills in CTFs, Part 1

Learn cybersecurity CTFs concept by concept. This lecture covers number bases, encodings, and the shell.

Lecture 2: General Skills in CTFs, Part 2

Dive deeper into the shell with common commands, power tools, and daisy-chaining with pipes.

Lecture 3: Python in CTFs

Learn Python through lecture, example, and challenges in the picoGym.

Lecture 4: Forensics in CTFs, Part 1

Learn the abstract layers of a computer and how files can be viewed as hexadecimal.

Lecture 5: Forensics in CTFs, Part 2

Learn about disk analysis, the Sleuthkit, and Autopsy from this challenge author.

Lecture 6: Forensics in CTFs, Part 3

Learn about pixels and digital steganography in this pico lecture.

Lecture 7: Forensics in CTFs, Part 4

Learn how to get started with packet analysis and Wireshark.