Last week, the College of Information Technology at Zayed University held the First Undergraduate Intercollegiate Cyber Defense Competition (UICDC2011), in the Convention Center of the Dubai campus. The Competition, organized in collaboration with Juniper Networks, Spectrum FZ, LLC, and the College of IT, was  hosted as part of the 3^rd Undergraduate Research Conference (URC2011) on May 4^th and 5^th, 2011. The eight teams from regional universities that participated in this competition consisted of: Zayed University (DXB and AUH), Manipal University, Khalifa University (Sharjah), United Arab Emirates University, Higher Colleges of Technology, Dubai Men’s College, American University of Sharjah (AUS), and Sharjah University (Men, and Women).

The competition required rigorous training and orientation of the Juniper products. The students from various teams attended a two full day workshop to be familiar with Juniper equipments, the students  were given virtual access to the Juniper Labs to have extensive hands-on the firewall devices. To our knowledge, this was the first security competition of its kind in the GCC region.

The theme of the competition is to secure the network by configuring the firewall with appropriate access controls and security policies to ensure the required services are up and running as per the requirements provided by the competition panel. Each teams were given three hours to do the necessary configurations and the judges from the industry (Juniper and Spectrum) and academic evaluated the teams solutions to secure the network.

The event was a great success. Dr. Sulaiman Al Jassim , presented the top three winning teams with great prizes, sponsored by Juniper Networks, that included: IPads, iPods, state of the art networking firewalls, vouchers for security certification exams, and gift vouchers for Virgin Mega Store.

The top three winning teams were as follows:

First Place :    Sharjah University, Men Campus:  Mohamed Torabi,  Weheeb Faiz

Second Place:  American University of Sharjah, AUS: Nasser Al Baloushi,  Abdulkarim Zidani

Third Place:    Zayed University, Abu Dhabi Campus:  Fatima Ghanem, Eman Obaid

Kudos to all the students that participated in this competition and congratulations to the winning teams for their exceptional performance. We are particularly proud of our  Zayed University team for securing third place in this tough competition.

Finally, a great appreciation goes to the organizing team, Dr. Mario Guimaraes Dr. Huwida Said, Mr. Nagarajan Chandrashekaran, Ms. Mona Bader and Dr. May ElBarachi for their dedication and countless hours of work as well as Dr. Qusay Mahmoud and Dr. Leon Jololian for their continuous support and advise that made this event such a great success. Special thanks and appreciation goes to Mr. Richard Austin  from Kennesaw State University and Southern Polytechnic State University, USA for his support and valued inputs. I would like to extend my thanks to Dr. Ibrahim Baggili and Dr. Anthony Rhodes for  their effort in recruiting students. We are also very grateful to all the students and their advisors of the other participating universities.