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MITRE Embedded Capture the Flag (eCTF)

Project Lead & Lead Developer

Jan 2024 – Present

  • leadership
  • competition

MITRE Embedded Capture the Flag (eCTF)

highlights.md
  • Leading my team's first- and second-time participation in MITRE's national Embedded Capture The Flag competition, managing recruitment of high school students and coordinating technical/operational aspects.
  • Developing embedded systems security expertise through firmware development in C on ARM Cortex-M4 (MAX78000 Microcontroller) hardware, implementing cryptographic protections and key management under strict memory and timing constraints.
  • Applying red team/blue team methodology by designing secure systems to defend against supply-chain attacks, firmware tampering, and side-channel exploits while meeting performance requirements (<150ms response times).
  • 2nd Place, High School Division, and Top 30 overall (2024); Top 50 overall (2025).

The eCTF is MITRE’s national embedded-security competition, and it’s structured unlike most CTFs: there’s a design phase where your team builds a real secure system on real hardware, and only if it passes every functional test do you advance to an attack phase, where you receive every other team’s compiled (source-hidden) design and try to break it — while everyone else tries to break yours.

I started the team from nothing in January of 9th grade: recruiting high schoolers with no embedded-systems background, coordinating logistics, and writing the firmware myself in C on the MAX78000’s ARM Cortex-M4. We placed 2nd among high school teams and top 30 overall in our first season (2024), and top 50 overall in our second (2025), in a field that’s mostly college teams.

What the challenges actually ask for

2024 — medical device supply-chain security. Design a system that lets a component manufacturer, integrator, and hospital all trust each other’s hardware: authenticate genuine components, detect counterfeits, and defend against firmware tampering and side-channel attacks on a device that ultimately touches a patient.

2025 — a satellite TV decoder. Build both halves of a subscription content-protection system: a Python encoder pushing ≥1,000 encrypted frames a second, and C firmware on the MAX78000 decoding them in under 150ms each, enforcing per-channel subscription windows, surviving power cycles, and rejecting replayed frames — while an emergency-broadcast channel has to stay accessible with no subscription at all.

Both years come down to the same tension: the security model has to hold up against an attacker with your compiled binary in hand, and the system still has to hit hard real-time performance numbers on genuinely resource-constrained hardware (128KB SRAM, 512KB flash). That’s a different kind of security engineering than most CTFs teach — closer to what an actual embedded-security or defense-hardware role looks like than a web-app CTF is.

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