NULLCON GOA 2022

Rohan Bhange,

9 Septemper 2022.

Nullcon is Asia's largest international security conference, where key stakeholders from the industry, delegates from the government company representatives, COOs and hackers come together to talk about InfoSec. NullCon 2022 Cybersecurity Conference was held in Hotel Grand Hyatt, Goa, India from the 9th to 10th of September. 

The event showcased five tracks: Operations Security, Reverse Engineering, Mobile and IoT Security, Advanced Threat Protection and Forensics. This year, the students of MIT-ADT CBC Club were able to attend the conference and witness some of the latest developments in cybersecurity. 

Twenty eight students embarked on the journey to NULLCON GOA 2022 International Security Conference accompanied by three faculty members. As soon as we entered the NullCon 2022 conference it was full of different booths by the sponsors of the conference. There were also a lot of people who came for this event to learn about cybersecurity. 

It began with a series of keynotes by eminent speakers from different industries. The opening note session was delivered by Alexander Popov, and he talked about “A Kernel Hacker Meets Fuchsia OS”. The talk was a deep dive into the design of Fuchsia OS and how it differs from other operating systems. 

This talk highlighted the design philosophy behind Fuchsia which is to be a modern operating system for the next 10 years. The kernel is written in Rust, which is a programming language that has strong security guarantees. 

As soon as the opening note was finished there were alot different seminars held within the various conference hall’s. Now the students had their options to attend any of these seminars as per their preference and interests. 

Now in this collective report we would like to include all of the experience that our students gained during this interval of conference within different seminars and competitions. 

We were lucky enough to meet with companies who are working on cybersecurity, cybercrime prevention, and cyber security management. We also met with companies who are providing cybersecurity training for different levels of professionals which provided us a good opportunity for students and mentors to make connections within the companies and our respective university. 

We had a great talk with a BugBase representative and invited them to our university for various activities and opportunities. Also we met the Spanish representative of IKEA, discussing how cybersecurity has a role to play in Global supply chain and management.

A talk with Microsoft and Airtel HR invited them to college for seminars, events and placement related activities. 

We had a great interaction with SANS and IKEA’s HR and Swedish representative, discussed about job opportunities and collaboration with the university. 

Achievements

As mentioned previously there were many booths of different companies who held various competitions. They also gave away some goodies to the winners of these competitions. 

Many students of MIT have enthusiastically participated in all these competitions and CTF’s held by various companies and won many goodies. 

Now, one of the major events held at the conference was the Capture the Flag (CTF) competition held by the Winja community. For a glance The Winja CTF is a Capture the Flag (CTF) competition for security enthusiasts, hackers, and reverse engineers. It was a one-day event where teams competed with each other to find vulnerabilities in various challenges. 

Sahil, a student from third year, participated and represented our college in the CTF competition. According to the experience shared by him, he participated in the Winja CTF competition for the first time. It was a tough competition and he had to work hard to make up with the competitors. There were many teams and they all had to compete with each other to get the top spot. 

The event was held at the Salao conference room, which was equipped by all the hackers and cybersecurity enthusiasts providing an excellent hacking environment. The organizers made sure that we were well taken care of by providing us with food and drinks throughout the event. 

Within the course of time he was at CTF he was able to find a few flags that they hid in their vulnerable application and was awarded with 50 points for each flag he found. At the end of the event he was able to find 6 flags gathering 300 points for the team and place the team on top 100 out of 500 teams. 

Meanwhile, the other students were attending other seminars held there. One of our students, Harsh, from third year, reported his experience about attending the seminars. He said, “This year’s event had a lot of seminars on different topics such as IoT, cyber security, cryptography and more. I attended various seminars held and learned a lot about the latest developments in the world of hacking”. 

He also mentioned various hands-on practicals held during these seminars which made a huge impact on his practical knowledge and perspective towards the field. He learnt about the differences between various fields and teams that act inside the whole world of cybersecurity namely red and blue team, forensics, cloud, etc. importance of linux OS and ecosystem. 

Himanshu a student from final year, was discussing the vulnerability found in the bank and UPI gateways with the CXO panelists Rajesh Hemrajani CISO Paytm Payments Bank, Anuprita Daga CISO Yes Bank, Shiju Rawther Head- IT- ET CIO. 

Conclusion

The visit to Nullcon Goa 2022 conference was an exceptional experience for all the students and the faculties. It has helped us to enhance our knowledge and understanding in the cybersecurity field and update our knowledge on the current trends in the industry. It has given a vast exposure to students and faculties, as many of us have connected to cybersecurity professionals from the country and abroad. 

We the students and faculties would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to the college for giving us this opportunity in the field of cybersecurity and sponsoring for the event. We are very grateful for the support extended to us by our college. Through this report we assure you that we have made the most out of this opportunity. 

We would like to specially thank Hon.Prof.Dr. Mangesh Karad Sir, Prof. Dr. Kishore Ravande, Prof. Dr. Rajneeshkaur Sachdeo, Prof. Dr. Shraddha Phansalkar, Prof. Dr. Ganesh Pathak, Dr. Nilesh Marathe, Dr. Shafi Pathan, Prof. Kiran Bidua for making this event successful. 

We look forward to organizing and working on more such events to strengthen the roots of cybersecurity in the MIT ADT UNIVERSITY with the management’s ever-growing support and guidance