• Contest Description and Rules
• Finalists of Round 1

Protecting user security and privacy is a huge responsibility, and software security is a big part of it. To help promote secure development habits, Google is partnering with the organizers of SyScan to host Hardcode, a secure coding contest on the Google App Engine platform, in which students learn how to design and develop secure applications.

Hardcode begins Friday, January 18 2013, and participation is open to teams of up to five full-time undergraduate or high school students (other restrictions may apply). After a qualifying round over the web, the final round for the top five teams will take place during SyScan, April 23-25 in Singapore.

The results are in!

This January, Google and SyScan announced a secure coding competition open to students from all over the world. Whereas Google’s Summer of Code and Code-in encourage students to contribute to open source projects, Hardcode was a call for students who wanted to showcase their skills both in software development and security. Given the scope of today’s online threats, we think it’s incredibly important to practice secure coding habits early on. Hundreds of students from 25 countries and across five continents signed up to get updates and information about the competition, and over 100 teams participated.

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During the preliminary online round, teams built applications on Google App Engine that were judged for both functionality and security. Five teams were then selected to participate in the final round at the SyScan 2013 security conference in Singapore, where they had to do the following: fix security bugs from the preliminary round, collaborate to develop an API standard to allow their applications to interoperate, implement the API, and finally, try to hack each other’s applications. To add to the challenge, many of the students balanced the competition with all of their school commitments.

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We’re extremely impressed with the caliber of the contestants’ work. Everyone had a lot of fun, and we think these students have a bright future ahead of them. We are pleased to announce the final results of the 2013 Hardcode Competition:

1st Place (SGD $20,000 prize):
Team 0xC0DEBA5E (Vienna University of Technology, Austria)