Just as students empty out of the auditoriums and teaching labs around DTU on Wednesday afternoons, the DTU Hackerlab comes to life. Here students from a range of study programmes come together—united by a shared interest in becoming better ethical hackers.
They try their hand at tasks that better equip them to spot errors and vulnerabilities in computer software and hardware. For example, is it possible to hack into a Bluetooth-enabled faucet, and what about penetrating a building's electronic access control system?
Hackerlab first opened its doors four years ago. According to Associate Professor Christian Damsgaard Jensen, the man behind the initiative, the purpose of the laboratory is to give students somewhere to acquire knowledge about the ways in which hackers attack, so that they can develop the best possible defences to keep the attackers at bay.
"We basically want to educate people who can build the shields that will protect us. To do that, they need to have a grasp of whether the attacker uses a sword, a spear, or a knife. In other words, you need to be familiar with their tactics, techniques, and procedures," he explains.
DTU students among the ethical hacking elite
Among Hackerlab's regulars are Alexander Thomsen Skovsende and Polly Nielsen Boutet-Livoff. They spend their afternoons perfecting the many different facets of hacking that have already bagged them a place on Denmark's national cyber team.
Their main areas of expertise are, respectively, binary exploitation (which is the ability to find coding errors and exploit them), and knowledge of encryption (which are methods of ensuring that information remains a secret that unauthorized parties cannot access).
