PicoCTF Hacking Competition is an annual hacking competition following the offensive capture the flag format, organized by the Carnegie Mellon University hacking team (The Plaid Parliament of Pwning) and co-developed by the Entertainment Technology Center. Our teams challenge is to develop a game which will be used to test the skill of young hackers, pique their interest in computer sciences and raise the awareness of today’s security vulnerabilities.

Behind every great project is a great team, and every great team has humble beginnings. This week, team PicoCTF2014 has banded together and after brutal discussions decided to identify ourselves as team Daedalus. Ask any random gamer what Daedalus means and the common reply would be “Dota?”, but few know that he was the man behind the creation of the renowned labyrinth; House of the notorious minotaur. Our team chose to reference the labyrinth and the story of the Theseus who managed to beat the labyrinth to slay the minotaur with the help of a ball of thread to guide him through the labyrinth and out again. Simple creative solutions to solve impassable problems, no doubt an inspiration to every potential future hacker participating in PicoCTF2014.

Our primary tasks of the week consisted of team building, research into picoCTF2013 and game design. We rallied our team members, advisors and clients under a common name and banner, and we are proud to release the first version of our team logo. We also had to come together to figure out potential and actual problems that were present in last year’s PicoCTF competition, so as to ensure we do not repeat past mistakes. Finally, team Daedalus and team Osiris(PicoCTF2013) may have been born from the same school, but we were determined to show that we are unique & distinct entities. Thus, we have focused majority of our efforts in designing a multitude of game narratives which could be used in PicoCTF2014. The narrative of choice will be released in the next newsletter.