Building a Cryptography Rotation Pipeline Intervention for Cyber Athletes: Curriculum Design and Coaching Lessons Learned

The United States Cyber Games started in 2021 to compete internationally in the annual International Cyber Competition (ICC). The United States Team prepares a seasonal team based on yearlong, volunteer coaches, volunteer athletes, and a rigorous virtual national training program to prepare cyber athletes to compete. Historically, the ICC has aimed to attract early-career professionals and raise global awareness of the education and skills needed in the area of cybersecurity. Teams from around the globe come together annually to compete in the ICC. Each year the areas of focus are updated and in general include: web application and system exploitation, cryptography, reverse engineering, hardware challenges, and attack/defense challenges. Early in the development of the first US team preparation to participate in their first ICC, it was realized a need to create a pipeline program to prepare strong athletes for potential entrance onto a future team if they were not already on the current team. This research reports on the volunteer pipeline coaching for building the curriculum, assessment challenges, and voluntary Institutional Review Board approved athlete feedback from the cryptography (crypto) training sessions of Season II in the US Cyber Games pipeline program. The crypto rotation is one of at least five rotations in the pipeline program where each rotation lasts a month on average. This full paper reports on our volunteer coaching insights, feedback, and curriculum for the crypto rotation sessions for need to know crypto topics for likely capture the flag and attack/defend competition questions and exercises including: symmetric, asymmetric, weak modes, padding schemas, key con-cepts, certificates, pseudo random number generators (PRNG), PRNG weaknesses, general crypto CTF tooling, socat usage, pcap extraction/interpretation related to RSA, Python related cryp-tography tools, Transport Layer Security (TLS) vulnerabilities, TLS packet exchange, and other cryptographic concepts, Given a research literature gap on building such a volunteer national team to compete international, we also report on the coaching experiences, challenges topics created for the rotation as well as the importance of proper tooling and preparation for the athletes. We share international topics advised for coverage for ICC training competitions. And, then report on coaching feedback and student voluntary IRB-approved feedback. Lastly, we share coach and athlete feedback and insights for next iterations of building a similar training session.