The Twente Hacking Squad Wins the Dutch AVR Challenge

On June 7th, the second edition of the Dutch Automated Vulnerability Research (AVR) Challenge took place at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, The Hague. The AVR challenge is an EU-funded project, and a collaboration between universities and private organizations, with the aim to push the development and research in the field of Automated Vulnerability Research in The Netherlands. Three UT students competed under the name of the Twente Hacking Squad (THS), the UT Capture The Flag (CTF) team.

For this year's competition, the task was to develop a fully automated tool to discover vulnerabilities in the target software provided by the organizers. The THS team was represented by Matas Aizenas (1st-year bachelor, TCS), Mattia Napoli (2nd-year cybersecurity exchange master student, SCS), and Jorik van Nielen (1st-year PhD, SCS). The team built a fully automated bug-finding pipeline around AFL++. By combining various state-of-the-art fuzzing techniques with smart configurations and scheduling, the designed tool managed to find the most vulnerabilities among the participating teams. This, in combination with their pitch, earned the Twente Hacking Squad the first place! On top of the honors, the THS team was awarded a prize of € 6.000.

Congratulations to Matas, Mattia, and Jorik for this achievement!