Thank you for taking part in the HackIntern Challenge.
Shortlisting will be based on your performance in the CTF, the quality of your write-up, and your academic record, and will be completed shortly. Shortlisted candidates will be interviewed online before final selection to four internship roles.
If you are shortlisted, you will be contacted at your registered email address.
How this round works
- Four tracks, three challenges each, worth 600, 700 and 800 points in order of difficulty.
- Challenges unlock one at a time. You will see one challenge per track to begin with — four in total. Solve it and the next in that track appears. That is not a fault; the rest are there and you earn your way to them.
- All four tracks are open from the start, so work whichever suits you. You do not have to finish one track before starting another.
- Every challenge carries its data and its brief as a single attached archive. Nothing to fetch from anywhere else. You must be logged in to download.
- Eight attempts per challenge. Hints are available and cost points.
- These are hard, and they are meant to be. Any tool you like is fair game, AI assistants included — but on every one of these the obvious approach produces a confident answer that is wrong. Check your working.
- More challenges will be added while the round is running. New serials can appear at any point before the clock runs out, so keep checking back — what you see now is not all there will be.
AI assistants — read this
- You may use AI assistants to solve the challenges. Any tool you like is fair game, and telling us where you used one counts in your favour, not against you.
- But we are testing the candidates, not the AI. Fully automated solving is detected, and the system may automatically suspend an account for 4 hours when it sees it. A suspension does not delete your solves or your score — you simply cannot submit until it lifts.
- Each track has a write-up challenge (H4), which opens once you have solved all three of that track's challenges. It asks for one PDF covering all three, 5 MB maximum. The report must be written by you, with no AI assistance. Solving with AI is allowed; writing the report with it is not.
- The write-up is what we actually shortlist on. A modest score with a report that shows real understanding beats a perfect score with nothing behind it.
Exercise PARCHAM. Four serials of signals and systems work, built from recordings of things that actually happen on an operational link. Everything is offline analysis — no hardware, and nothing here asks you to transmit. Register with the address your invitation was sent to.
UAV Track
Pokhran, Barmer and Jaisalmer. A spoofed satellite navigation serial with no discontinuity to find, a frequency-hopping uplink to predict, and a sensor network being lied to by two of its own stations.
CEMA Track
Barmer and the Rann of Kutch. A key read off a power rail, a squadron seal that is not as one-way as it looks, and a flight controller that scrubbed its key on shutdown and did not scrub enough.
RF Analysis Track
Siliguri corridor and Tezpur. Two emitters sharing one carrier, a link 12 dB under the noise whose spreading code was never handed over, and a radio tuned to impersonate another.
5G / Mobile Analysis Track
Kandla container terminal. Data leaving a captive 5G network without touching a payload, an injected NAS message hiding among honest retransmissions, and a handset to follow through a dozen cells.