2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Increasing Student Hackathon Involvement Through a Cybersecurity Track

Presented at Community Engagement Division (COMMENG) Technical Session 3

HackNewHaven is a multidisciplinary collegiate hackathon intended to bring the spirit of collaboration, innovation, and experiential learning across multiple disciplines of computing, engineering, and cybersecurity. The inaugural event focused on software development tracks through AI, gaming, and app-based projects. However, rapid growth of cybersecurity education and demand in the industry created a natural impulse to incorporate a cybersecurity-focused track within the present HackNewHaven setting, thus making it more holistic and future projection-oriented.

Typically, hackathons offer a blank canvas for innovation or software design, but they do not touch on secure development and adversarial thinking, the very basis of engineering education today. To counter this contradiction, a cybersecurity track was added to bridge the gap between academic theory and its practical application. The track seeks to broaden the base of participants, including demographics who would have otherwise been steered away from software-oriented hackathons. A goal of this is to enhance interdisciplinary collaboration joining computer science, cybersecurity, and engineering orientations. Further, this addition is in line with national educational initiatives such as the NSA GenCyber and NCAE-Cyber programs, fostering an increased supply of professionals for cyber defense and systems security.

In realizing this track, the organizers decided to stage a Capture the Flag (CTF) competition via an open-source CTF platform. The CTF subjected participants to a battery of hands-on cybersecurity challenges of increasing difficulty across different domains like web exploitation, cryptography, network forensics, and reverse engineering. In placing its challenges behind the veil of a common storyline, teams were treated to a gamified simulation of real-world security operations. This locally hosted CTF instance means proper management and scoring of challenges and acceptance of team registrations. It enables the competitors to focus on problem-solving as a team under reasonable time constraints, similar to live incident response and mitigation techniques.

Authors

Mr. Thomas Rossi http://orcid.org/0009-0003-2226-4023 University of New Haven [biography]

Thomas Rossi is the Assistant Chair of the University of New Haven's Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science department. He is also the coordinator for the BS in Computer Science program. His research focuses on improving the post-secondary experience for students through the use of current computing tools and technologies. Thomas graduated with his MS in Computer Science from the University of New Hampshire in 2016. He has previously worked at the Rochester Institute of Technology and at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College.
Shivanjali Khare http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3764-2360 University of New Haven [biography]

Dr. Khare is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science (ECECS) at the University of New Haven. She earned her M.S. in 2018 and Ph.D. in 2021 in Computer Science from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Dr. Khare's research leverages Internet of Things (IoT) systems, artificial intelligence (AI), and advanced data optimization techniques. By fusing theoretical foundations with practical applications, her work addresses real-world challenges through the dual lenses of safety and automation.
Kyle Mather University of New Haven [biography]

Kyle Mather is an Information Security Engineer at Principal Financial Group, and recent Computer Science and Cybersecurity graduate from the University of New Haven. His work focuses on information security, third-party cyber risk management, and the application of cloud and AI-driven technologies to detect and mitigate security threats. He has contributed to vendor risk assessments, compliance initiatives aligned with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 frameworks, and security alert analysis, and was recognized as a winner of Principal’s 2025 Code Jam for co-developing an AWS-based application that detects social engineering and sensitive data leaks using large language models. At the University of New Haven, he has also led the design and implementation of a Capture the Flag (CTF) competition for Hack New Haven, creating hands-on cybersecurity challenges across multiple domains, while balancing his academic and professional work as a former NCAA Division I student-athlete on the men’s soccer team.

Download paper (428 KB)

Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.

» Download paper

« View session