It's April 2018. Seven ECE undergraduates arrive at an intercollegiate embedded security competition run by the MITRE Corporation. It's the culminating event of a three-month long technical campaign against university teams from all over the country.

An MIT team is here, and teams from the University of Connecticut and the University of Pennsylvania. This is the third year of the contest, so it's old hat to some, who are juniors now and have been competing since they were freshman.

But no Hokies have ever attempted this particular competition. It's capture the flag, but better—an embedded cybersecurity version of capture the flag—and Virginia Tech's Hokie Hackers are up for the challenge.

First, MITRE administrators issue each team a design challenge. The Hokie Hackers are presented with a system that involves a chip-and-pin banking system design (the technology commonly used in debit cards).

The Hokie Hackers put their stamp on the design, bulking up the system's security features and hardening the design against a variety of attacks. They are the second team to submit a working design.

Pitting their skills against teams from 10 other schools, the Hokie Hackers engage full throttle, bent on accumulating points for effective attacks and a stalwart defense.

They sniff out and exploit weaknesses in opponents' designs, racking up points with every system they can hack. Defensive points are awarded each day that a team's design withstands an attack, remaining secure and unvanquished.

The end of the competition finds the Hokie Hackers victorious, in possession of three separate awards: the "Flag Factory" for capturing the most flags (42), the "Iron Flag" for accumulating the most defensive points while protecting six of their nine flags, and the coveted "1st place overall," which is awarded for a combination of offensive and defensive victories.