From March 7 to 17, CVHS’ Cybersecurity Club participated in the picoCTF competition, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University, placing at sixth place out of hundreds of participating teams.

A capture the flag competition rooted in problem-solving and creative thinking, the online competition offers puzzles in six areas – general skills, reversing, binary exploitation, forensics, web exploitation and cryptography – with the aim of deepening student interest in cybersecurity. 

The Cybersecurity Club started when a group of friends with a collective interest in puzzle-solving and cybersecurity got together to participate in competitions like picoCTF.

“A majority of our members, then, were seniors, and the Cybersecurity Club wasn’t really a thing back then. It was just a group of friends doing things. Sophomore year, me and Andrew [Du], we decided to create the club,” club’s president Suhurrith Adhikari said.

Adhikari and Vice President, Andrew Du, have been passionate and involved in the world of cybersecurity since middle school. A teacher of theirs introduced the pair to the picoCTF competition in sixth grade. They continued participating in the competition until the present day. Du even won a cash prize in eighth grade for his success in the competition.

This year, the club scored sixth out of hundreds of other participating teams in the picoCTF competition. Carnegie Mellon flies out the top 5 teams to participate in an in-person round of competition on their campus. Although CVHS’ team did not make it to the top 5 this year, they have high hopes for the 2025 competition, emphasizing the importance of training underclassmen on skills for the competition.

“This year we had mainly underclassmen and were trying to teach them the ropes of how to get into this competition. We taught them mainly cryptography guidelines, because that’s usually a pretty good entry point into the rest of picoCTF,” Adhikari said.

Besides the skills that club members are trained in during club meetings, Adhikari and Du emphasize the importance of teamwork and collaboration. This past semester, club members met virtually over spring break, as it was during the time the competition is held. Adhikari and Du reflect on the strong teamwork and collaboration their team developed during that time.

“I’d say everybody participated every single day, pitching in, coming up with ideas, a lot of teamwork, really. In terms of puzzle-solving, sometimes I might get an idea that Andrew might not have thought of or vice versa, and then we’ll work together to solve it,” Adhikari said.

Despite their successes, the Cybersecurity Club has had to overcome challenges. In the past, the club has faced challenges like maintaining activity and member count, as the topic of cybersecurity is quite niche.

“Cybersecurity isn’t something that’s fully computer science based. It’s a little bit more specific than that. So it was a little hard getting activity, but we did a lot of outreach, especially with the underclassmen,” said Adhikari.

There were also issues with the cryptography challenges themselves in the picoCTF 2025 competition, four out of ten challenges being invalid, affecting the outcome of new members’ participation. The contest managers determined that these challenges had errors, and therefore they could not be distributed to contest participants for solving.

Although the picoCTF competition is the highlight of the club’s year, they have other events lined up for their members or other students interested in cybersecurity. For example, this year, the club hosted their very own “hackathon” competition, called Rhino CTF, during the month of February.

“We wanted to create our own competition to raise more awareness. Our [picoCTF] competition team was basically comprised of the people that participated in the Rhino CTF,” Adhikari said.

Challenge topics ranged from cryptography to forensics. The challenge proved to be a fun way to introduce new members to picoCTF-like challenges.

“We came up with our own ideas and challenges,” Adhikari said of the Rhino CTF challenge. “We mostly focused on cryptography, because we thought that topic would be the most interesting and the most fun, while also teaching the students something. It was fun!” 

Adhikari and Du find that having the opportunity to intentionally make vulnerabilities in our puzzles is a completely different side of cybersecurity that proved to be very interesting, both for themselves and the challenge participants.

To anybody interested in the world of cybersecurity or technology, Adhikari and Du encourage them to learn more about the club. The club hosts bi-weekly meetings every other Friday in Mr. Kulkarni’s room during the second half of lunch.

“We wanted to create a genuine interest in cybersecurity [through the club].” Adhikari and Du said. We hope to see you there!”