Falcons Innovation Challenge
In partnership with UWECyber.
Challenging students to solve the problems of tomorrow.
The Challenge
The UWE Falcons Cyber Innovation Challenge is a competition open to all UWE students (non-teaching students), wherein students of all levels of experience 1st year, 2nd year (placement students classify as 2nd year students), 3rd year and postgraduate students are tasked with developing solutions to prominent modern day cyber challenges.
These challenges will align with the NCSC Research Problem Book (NCSC – RPB). Students will have until 2pm on the 5th of April 2025 to submit their solution to the UWE Falcons competition email address – innovator@ctffalcons.com. The Entry Portal will open at 12:00 on the 1st of March 2025.
Submissions will be judged by Ian Caple – CTF Falcons founder, Professor Phil Legg – UWE and a.n.other, with the winners being announced and prizes awarded at the UWE CTF Falcons annual dinner on the 23rd May, 2025.
Cybersecurity faces many problems from tackling legacy systems with Operational Technology to the continued prevalence of phishing and spear-phising campaigns. Recent years have seen a surge of cyber incidents the world over, and the need for new innovative solutions is in greater demand than ever before. If you’re reading this then you are part of the next generation of cybersecurity experts and the UWE Falcons Cyber Innovation Challenge is your chance to take the concepts and knowledge learnt in the classroom and apply it to the problems of today and tomorrow.
To that end, for the 24/25 academic year we have identified 3 key problems taken from the NCSC problem research book. Your task is to research these problems and devise as innovative a solution as possible. Draft this solution in a Solution Document, and where possible develop a working prototype for your solution. Though a prototype is not necessary, solutions submitted with a working prototype or functioning code will be viewed favourably.
Your Solution Document should be a maximum of 2000 words and outline the problem, your solution and include references and links to online repositories such as Github for any supporting code and materials (See competition rules).
So without further ado let’s take a look at the problems:
The Challenge
The Problems
Problem One:
How do we create and adopt meaningful measures of cyber security?
“Governments around the world are publishing their cyber security strategies, starting new initiatives to improve the cyber security of their citizens and businesses, or to minimise the harm in the wake of incidents. But as an industry, we have no means of measuring success or comparing results. Is the UK National Cyber Strategy living up to its objective to make the UK “the safest place to work and do business online” – or is another country’s cyber security strategy somewhere else making more of a difference?
Whether focusing at country scale, or within an individual organisation, we can't understand which investments in cyber security will make the biggest difference without a meaningful set of metrics and measurements.”
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/collection/problem-book/cross-cutting/cc3-create-meaningful-measures
Problem Two:
How do we make phishing a thing of the past?
“For years cyber security practitioners have been asking users to try and spot phishing emails and to not ‘click the link’ or open an attachment. But we know that with enough research, or a big enough sample size, an attacker will always succeed in tricking the user. This is not the user’s fault – we shouldn't expect a user to be able to detect a suspicious message when a computer can’t. We need to reduce the burden on users and make computers do the heavy lifting.”
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/collection/problem-book/cross-cutting/cc4-make-phishing-thing-past
Problem Three:
How can we build systems we can trust?
“Hardware is becoming more complex all the time and it’s difficult to gain confidence in long global supply chains. This in turn means diminished confidence in individual computers, circuit boards and microchips. But to protect our critical national infrastructure (CNI), defence and intelligence systems and more besides, we need to build computer systems we can rely on.
Addressing this problem requires a combination of techniques that touch on many different aspects of cyber security, technology and risk.”
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/collection/problem-book/cross-cutting/cc1-build-system-trust
You may only submit one solution, so take care to research the problem that you feel best suits you.
For each educational category there are three prizes. 1st, 2nd and 3rd place for 1st year, 2nd year (placement students classify as 2nd year students), 3rd year and postgraduate MSc students. Plus an overall prize winner for the best solution across all academic categories.
The prize allocation for each category is as follows:
Winner: A CompTIA Security+ Certification bundle. Which includes an exam voucher, retake voucher (hopefully you won’t need that) and self-study guide. A UWE CTF Falcons Hoodie, and £150 Amazon Voucher.
The CompTIA Security+ certification is one of the leading industry standard entry level certifications and will go a long way to helping those who pass to get started in their careers once they graduate from UWE.
2nd Place: £100 Amazon Voucher and a UWE Falcons Hoodie.
3rd Place: £50 Amazon Voucher and a UWE Falcons limited edition t-shirt.
Overall Winner:
Of the shortlisted candidates the person that submitted the most eloquent and innovative solution will also receive the UWE Innovators Challenge trophy.
All short-listed entries will be invited as guests to the UWE CTF Falcons Annual Dinner on the 23rd of May ’25, where the winners will be announced and prizes awarded.
The Prizes
Competition Rules
The UWE Falcons Cyber innovation challenge is open to all current non-staff University West of England students. Competitors have until 2pm on the 5th of April 2025 to submit their solution to one of the below cyber problems in the following way:
· Email entries to competition@ctffalcons.com with the subject title ‘UWE Cyber Innovation Challenge. All entries must be submitted using your UWE email address. Entries submitted using any other email address will not be considered.
· Submissions must clearly include the following details: Applicants Name, UWE Student Name, Academic Year (1st, 2nd, 3rd, Postgrad), Solution Document and supporting materials.
· Solution Documents must bear the title of the problem they aim to solve, name and UWE Student number of the author, and detail the applicants’ solution. The Solution document must be under 2000 words, excluding an appendix and supporting documents. Supporting documents such as code, prototype designs should be uploaded to an online repository such as Github and clearly referenced in the Solution document.
· The deadline for entries is 2pm on the 5th of April 2025. Any submission received after this date will not be considered. The submission portal innovator@ctffalcons.com will go live at 12:00 on the 1st of March 2025.
· The top 3 entries in each category will be invited to the UWE CTF Falcons Summer Gala on May 23rd 2025 wherein the winners of each category will be announced.
· Shortlisted applicants will be notified by the 9th of May 2023, and published across UWE CTF Falcons social media platforms.
· The judges’ decisions are final and may not be appealed.
Any questions and queries regarding the challenge format should be addressed to contact@ctffalcons.com with the subject heading: Innovator Challenge Query.
Though we cannot give advice on the state or worth of your project, we will endeavour to help point you in the right direction. Your UWECyber teaching staff will happily help you shape your solutions.
Please Note: This is not an academic requirement for UWE students, but an opportunity for you to explore areas of cybersecurity research and grow beyond the classroom.
Your academic responsibilities and requirements must come first.