Table Tops Soon to be Hacked

Category: Science & Technology
Posted: July 26, 2012 07:21AM
Author: Guest_Jim_*

The Black Hat 2012 security conference is quickly approaching and some details on what will be there are being announced. Though the focus of the conference is security exploits and how to fix them, researchers from the University of Washington will be bringing with them 'Control-Alt-Hack,' the computer security card game.

With mechanics from Steve Jackson and funding from Intel, the NSF, and the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education, the game is designed to impart some real information to players, but most importantly be fun. Players work for the company Hackers, Inc. which performs security audits and acts as a security consultant. As an employee, they are given different challenges, such as disrupting a hotel minibar's radio-tag payment system, and then telling the manager. (A real exploit related to hotel keycard systems will also be presented at the conference.)

The target audience for this game is between the ages of 15 and 30 years old, with some familiarity with computer science. You don't have to be a computer scientist to play or even be all that knowledgeable of computer security. The researchers hope this will help people learn some about computer security but also about computer scientists. The in-game characters are based on current and former graduate students at UW, and has them depicted enjoying their real-life hobbies, such as motorcycling and rock climbing.

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