Excellence Award of Hackathon and Convergence Security Council 2023, Kim Jin-moo (Software Department 23) Hakwoo
- SKKU National Program of Excellence in Software
- Hit444
- 2023-10-13
The 2023 Hackathon and Convergence Security Council was held on two days on August 24 and 25 at the Natural Science Campus. Unlike last year, this hackathon was conducted in CTF (Capture The Flag) format. It is a method of obtaining points by submitting the flag obtained by finding vulnerabilities in the program and attacking it to the competition site. In 2023, the hackathon and convergence security council presented questions in four areas: system hacking, reverse engineering, crypto, and blockchain. Professor Kim Hyung-sik, who oversaw the event, aimed for a competition where participants could immerse themselves in the event and focus on problems rather than competition, and for this purpose, a tutorial by a professor who presented questions in each field was conducted before the CTF competition began. Various teams won the award in the field of learning through immersion, and among them, Kim Jin-moo of the "23rd Class Freshman Team," who participated as an individual, received the Excellence Award. Kim Jin-moo has participated in a number of hacking defense contests since he was a high school student, dreaming of becoming an information security expert. She won first place in large-scale contests such as the White Hat Contest and the Wacon, and also enjoyed the pleasure of winning individual competitions such as the Dubai World Hacking Defense Conference, Code Gate and the National Youth Information Protection Festival. Kim Jin-moo does not stop at solving problems, but instead runs a hacking defense contest, presents questions, and shows his passion for hacking. Let's listen to the story of Kim Jin-moo, who is constantly developing in search of his weaknesses.
Q. Hello. Congratulations on winning the Excellence Award in the '2023 Hackathon and Convergence Security Council'. I'd like to hear your thoughts.
Hello. Thank you for congratulating me. Thank you to the professors for holding a quality problem and a competition with good intentions. I thought it was a great opportunity to prove the knowledge I had studied so far at Sungkyunkwan University. I was worried that most of the participants would be able to do well because they were a team of graduate students, but it is an honor to get good results. I'm thankful and proud because my friends, especially my parents, seem to be happier than I am.
Q. How did you feel about this event?
Since I have always participated in hacking defense competitions with the mindset of winning first place, I participated with the mindset of winning first place again. After entering college for the first time, I enjoyed my school life with my colleagues and concentrated on my studies, so I participated with the mindset of starting a new start. I thought it was an opportunity to look back and check my skills by participating in a single team.
Q. Is there an episode that you remember that it wouldn't have been easy to solve a problem by yourself in 23rd grade?
There were two questions in the blockchain field, but I remember shoveling a simple question for three hours because I didn't have any knowledge of blockchain. It was solved by almost all teams except me, but I think I was the only one who couldn't solve it, so I kept holding on. So I realized that I had a misconception of the memory structure of the smart contract after trying many things with the debugging method you explained in the tutorial session, and after three hours of shoveling, I was able to solve the problem. After solving it, I felt like I would have solved it easily if it was the knowledge I knew. If I hadn't used the debugging tools I learned from the tutorial, I couldn't do this shoveling process at all, so I thought that conducting the tutorial before the contest was a very good way to fit the purpose of the contest.
Q. What did you gain from this experience?
I learned about new concepts related to smart contract, PAC attack, and I was able to understand them deeply by solving them myself. It was difficult to find motivations and seniors who were interested in hacking around me, but by participating in this competition, I learned that there are undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in hacking. I thought I would have more experience and knowledge to gain from working with students and great professors who are interested in security in the future.
Q. I wonder why you became interested in hacking.
I was curious about the word hacking itself, and I was wondering if I could take it as a job. "You can prevent hacking by analyzing vulnerabilities and patching them in advance," I heard it said, "Information security experts can hack legally." I think that's when I started studying.
Q. You've been participating in many competitions since you were a high school student, so please share your stories and personal tips.
I have a personality that motivates me only when I have a goal, so I decided to win the Hacking Defense Contest as the hacking defense contest. At first, I got a sense of the hacking problem by solving various problems on a war game site that solves hacking problems, and then I participated in various hacking defense contests to solve the problem. I repeatedly solved problems that I couldn't solve during the competition by looking at the problem-solving report, but in this respect, hacking seems to be similar to math.
I got a lot of help from my high school senior in this course. During the first few months of studying hacking, I think I asked every day what I didn't know and what I was curious about. In the beginning, I lacked the sense of vulnerability analysis and attack to the extent that I solved the problems myself, and I asked my seniors for hints or referred to solving problems on the Internet. In this process, I contracted a lot, but I was able to see myself developed enough to solve most of the problems by myself at some point. As soon as I got the hang of it, it seemed that my skills were naturally accelerated. Since then, whenever I participated in competitions such as the Ministry of National Defense, Code Gate, and Dubai World Hacking Defense Competition, I think I have maintained the top ranks in the finals and made a name for myself in the youth department.
I think it's most important to do it consistently and set goals. If you have an acquaintance who can accept questions about what you don't know and support you, you will be able to gain knowledge more easily based on your previous trial and error and experience. If you're interested in CTF, please contact me personally and I'll do my best to help you out.
In addition, we plan to focus on upgrading services such as adding the Jongno 07 bus timetable, which has recently entered the school, displaying congestion through user data of the Sukbus app, and adding notification functions. Mobile app accessibility will also be improved so that all Sungkyunkwan University students can use the Sukbus app without any inconvenience.
In the long run, I would like to ask the question 'Why?' that I had at the beginning of the semester in a bigger world beyond Sungkyunkwan University. My goal is to be a developer who finds another inconvenience there and solves it in my own way.