Software Engineering Institute

Cybersecurity competitions provide a way for participants to learn and develop hands-on technical skills, and they serve to identify and reward talented cybersecurity practitioners. They also form part of a larger, multifaceted effort for ensuring the nation has a highly skilled cybersecurity workforce to secure its critical infrastructure systems and to defend against cyber attacks. To help support these efforts of cultivating the skills of cybersecurity practitioners and of building a workforce to safeguard the nation, this paper draws on the Software Engineering Institute’s (SEI) experience developing cybersecurity challenges for the President’s Cup Cybersecurity Competition and provides general-purpose guidelines and best practices for developing effective cybersecurity challenges.