Students assigned to cheat on exam use doctored Little Brother cover and many other clever methods

Cory Doctorow 10:13 am Mon Jun 11, 2012

The IEEE's Computer and Reliability Societies recently published "Embracing the Kobayashi Maru," by James Caroland (US Navy/US Cybercommand) and Greg Conti (West Point) describing an exercise in which they assigned students to cheat on an exam — either jointly or individually. The goal was to get students thinking about how to secure systems from adversaries who are willing to "cheat" to win. The article describes how the students all completed the exam (they all cheated successfully), which required them to provide the first 100 digits of pi, with only 24h to prepare. The students used many ingenious techniques as cribs, but my heart was warmed to learn that once student printed a false back-cover for my novel Little Brother with pi 1-100 on it (Little Brother is one of the course readings, so many copies of it were already lying around the classroom).

James and Greg have supplied a link to a pre-pub of the paper (the original is paywalled), and sent along a video of a presentation they gave at Shmoocon where they presented the work. The students' solutions are incredibly ingenious — the audience is practically howling with laughter by the end of the presentation.

(Thanks, Ben!)

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