The CSSA organising committee is excited to announce that Cisco will be hosting a Secure Access Capture the Flag (CTF) challenge designed to put your technical expertise to the test. 

This isn’t a standard walkthrough. It is a series of complex, architecturally focused scenarios requiring your knowledge and rapid security analysis.

This event is built for anyone who want to stress-test their understanding of the role of secure access in the AI era. Having a hands-on experience on what policies, threat vectors, and mitigation strategies are within their current stack.

What is Capture the Flag?

Capture the Flag is a gamified way to solve real lab challenges and gain hands-on experience with Cisco technologies, including enterprise networking, security, data center, Meraki, collaboration, and more.

Challenge focus areas

Architecture analysis: Debugging complex access flows and identifying misconfigurations.

Threat mitigation: Executing secure access policies to neutralise simulated lateral movement and unauthorised access attempts.

Policy optimisation: Balancing zero-trust constraints with operational performance.  

Why participate

Hands-on experience: Work through complex security challenges in a safe, simulated environment.
Skill development: Gain practical experience with Secure Access configurations and threat detection.
Networking: Connect with peers and share strategies in a collaborative, competitive setting.

Workshop details

Date: 7 September 2026

Time: 

• 08:00 to 08:25 - Registration
• 08:30 to 11:30 - Workshop

Location: New Lecture Theatre, Upper Campus

Prerequisites

• All participants must bring their own laptop. Power will be supplied.
• Mandatory for all participants to have a cisco.com account. Information about this will be communicated to participants prior to the workshop.
• Those playing CiscoCTF for the first time, are required to sign up for an account via the link emailed to you before the workshop.
• Those with existing Cisco.com IDs, must make sure that they can sign in to the CTF portal using the event link.