MCLEAN, Va. & BEDFORD, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#cybersecurity–At an award celebration at Tufts University, MITRE honored the winners, participants, and sponsors of its 2025 Embedded Capture the Flag (eCTF) Competition, a semester-long program for cultivating the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.
Celebrating its 10th anniversary, the MITRE eCTF had more than 1,200 students participate on 139 teams, representing 123 schools from 17 countries. Through collaboration amongst academia, industry, and government, the competition fosters technical expertise and innovative thinking and helps to build a workforce capable of securing the systems that underpin modern society.
“The number of connected devices we rely upon every day—whether in our homes or in critical infrastructure like the power grid—is growing at a rapid pace, and these devices are vulnerable,” said Doug Robbins, vice president, engineering and prototyping, MITRE. “With the unique, hands-on, immersive, hardware-focused experience eCTF provides, participants develop essential skills in both offensive and defensive cybersecurity, preparing them for future careers and growing the workforce in this critical field.”
Sponsored in part by the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub, the eCTF competition invites university and high school teams to develop, secure, and defend embedded systems against simulated cyberattacks.
“The MITRE eCTF has been an excellent platform for CrowdStrike to engage with and nurture emerging cybersecurity talent. We’ve been impressed by the technical prowess and innovative thinking demonstrated during the competition, and several standout participants have successfully progressed from interns to full-time team members,” said Joel Spurlock, vice president of data science, CrowdStrike, a sponsor for the competition. “This partnership is a prime example of how industry-academic collaboration can create pathways for aspiring cybersecurity professionals.”
The competition’s focus on securing embedded systems aligns closely with the needs of industries like aerospace and defense, where reliability and safety are paramount. For example, Rolls-Royce is a sponsor of the eCTF as it aims to develop cybersecurity engineering talent.
“At Rolls-Royce, we build jet engines and power systems that must be reliable and safe. As these systems have become increasingly enabled by digital systems, it is important that we make sure that they are also secure,” said N. Luke Thomas, group chief product security engineer, Rolls-Royce. “As some of our customers say, ‘If you aren’t secure, you aren’t safe!’ To do this well, we need a robust pipeline of system security engineers to help secure the systems we build, but we also need our partners, our suppliers, and even our competitors to have the same! It is exciting for us to help sponsor an event like the MITRE eCTF. Contributing to the community of people securing cyber-physical systems, as well as helping to grow the next generation of system security engineers and cybersecurity engineers via an experience with both offensive and defensive components, is engineering-centric, and is deeply experiential.”
The top winners in the 2025 MITRE eCTF Competition include:
- First place overall: Carnegie Mellon University, winning $10,000
- Second place overall: Purdue University, winning $5,000
- Third place overall: University of Michigan, winning $2,500
Carnegie Mellon University, the winner of the competition, emphasized student collaboration as central to their success.
“The greatest values I see in the eCTF are the ways that the competition incorporates multiple aspects of real-world design—including systems, networking, software, and security—and the way this naturally attracts, includes, and values students with diverse academic backgrounds and perspectives,” said Patrick Tague, associate teaching professor, Information Networking Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. “Students on the team are able to learn from and support each other through the challenges in the competition, and every student provides unique value to the success of the team.”
Additional award-winning schools, receiving $2,500 each, include:
- Top high school: Mountain View High School of Mountain View, California
- Top community college: City College of San Francisco
- Attacking spirit: Brigham Young University
Achieving success in their debut appearance in the competition, Mountain View High School’s Information Security (InfoSec) Club was the top high school winner and placed in the top 10 teams overall.
“I have been very impressed with the technical excellence of all the teams as well as how well MITRE has run the competition,” said Jennifer Chiu, InfoSec club advisor and math teacher, Mountain View High School. “I am also exceedingly proud of our team’s hard work and collaboration to attain their standing as one of the highest achieving teams in this year’s competition, despite their young age. Through the eCTF experience, they have greatly expanded their scope of cybersecurity knowledge into hardware and learned how to design an embedded security system using hardware-software co-optimization. Our team plans to come back to compete again next year.”
The eCTF sets itself apart from other competitions in three ways. First, the focus is on securing embedded systems, which presents a new set of challenges and security issues that are not currently covered by traditional “online” CTFs. Second, unlike the standard attack-only CTF, the eCTF balances offense and defense by including design, build, and attack components. Finally, the eCTF runs throughout the spring semester, allowing time for development and for advanced attacks during the Attack Phase.
About MITRE’s eCTF
MITRE’s eCTF is a competition like no other. Each spring, hundreds of talented students compete in the 12-week competition focused on the world of embedded systems—an arena that brings forth a new realm of challenges and security threats. Originally created to address challenges in MITRE’s recruiting pipeline, today’s eCTF reaches more than 1,200 students from around the world and engages government, industry, and academia in collaboration to address workforce and training gaps in the critical area of embedded and cyber security. Sponsors for the 2025 competition included Analog Devices, Boston Cybernetics Institute, CrowdStrike, Fortinet, NEMC Hub, Rolls-Royce, and Sysdig. To learn more about becoming a sponsor or participating in the competition, visit https://ectf.mitre.org.
About MITRE
MITRE’s mission-driven teams are dedicated to driving solutions to our nation’s most pressing challenges. As a not-for-profit research and development organization, MITRE’s staff leverage our unique multi-sponsor vantage point, systems expertise, and innovative solutions to ensure the health, prosperity, and security of our nation.
Contacts
Media Contacts: Lisa Fasold and Pat Rouleau, [email protected]
