HomeNews‘Hacking’ your way into CuriousU: we have a winner!

‘Hacking’ your way into CuriousU: we have a winner!

Over 250 students attend the University of Twente’s CuriousU Summer School annually: a summer school in festival style, combining courses and lectures with music and theatre, for example. Earlier this year, we set up a competition for interested students to win an entrance ticket. Contestants had to ‘hack’ their way into the festival. This year’s winner is André Pinto Paradinha from Portugal, who is currently finishing his management degree at his home university.

Faster and smarter

André was very motivated to find this year’s solution as soon as possible. Last year, he just missed out, with one contestant being just a day faster. Using last years’ experience, he managed to submit the correct answer and therefore earned his free access to CuriousU 2018.

How did you find out the right way to go?
André: “I started by looking at the hints given (brute-forcing) and found some programs that perform this method of cracking codes which led me to the concept of hashing. In a nutshell, hashing is the translation of a code into a string of letters and numbers through a specific algorithm. After understanding how this works, I found the hash in the curiousU webpage and since the code starts with an X, I decided to try just uppercase letters in order to limit the number of combinations and crack the code faster. However, after one week the program ran all the possibilities and couldn’t find the code, so I decided to include numbers as well, and in less than three days I got the code!”

What are you looking forward to most in this years' CuriousU?
“Since last year, I have started to learn more about blockchain and cryptocurrencies. So I’m looking forward to delve into the Blockchain Tech course and learn all about the applications of this technology. Even though I don’t have a computer science background, my curiosity and the knowledge I’ve gathered while learning how to crack the code will certainly be helpful to succeed in this course.”

CuriousU 2018 is being held from 12 August until 21 August at the campus of the University of Twente. Visit the website for more information.

L.P.W. van der Velde MSc (Laurens)
Spokesperson Executive Board (EB)