CAE Cyber Competitions in 2022

Overview

The National Centers of Academic Excellence (CAE) in Cybersecurity Community is composed of more than 300 institutions across five geographic regions, and the national competition program will follow this regional structure. Each region is led by a Regional Competition Coordinator, and the first competition cycle will have the capacity for up to 165 CAE institutions to participate.

As a member of the CAE community, University of Denver students have the opportunity to participate in these nationwide cyber security training events. There are multiple different types of games/competitions, from typical capture the flag (CTF) style, to blue team (cyber defense), table top exercises and more!

There are multiple events for this academic year (2026-2027), please see the links below for more information.

If you are looking for more general CTF schedules, two resources are

• CAE Cyber Atlas : decent list of CTFs
• CTFTime : can be hard to parse, but lots of competitions are in there

Specific CAE affiliated competitions

• NCAE Cyber Games returns! For all levels, red/blue class CTF style event. Registration and qualifying rounds run year round See: NCAE Cyber Games
• CCDC 2027 - Not specifically CAE, but lots of CAE institutions participate NCCDC 2027
• Cyberforce
• NSA Codebreaker (may not exist anymore…)

Interested?

If you’re already a student at DU, join the DUCC (DU Cyber Club) slack channel for updates CS@DU Slack. You’ll have to join our CS@DU slack workspace first, then join the DUCC channel. Email us if you have any issues! Also, the folks who run the cyber club have created an even cooler way to discuss, on discord! If you want to join that, send an email to the same place and we’ll put you in touch with the folks who run it.

If you’re not already a student at DU, but are interested in learning more, Email us about the courses and programs at the University of Denver, browse this site, or check out the University of Denver Ritchie School of Engineering and Computer Science main site for more info!