The Centre for Information Technology Integration (CITI) based at Michigan University has been developing the honeyd utility, which is used for deploying honeypots, an increasingly popular security research tool.
Honeypots are monitored systems, sometimes with specific vulnerabilities, effectively set up to be attacked and compromised so that researchers may gain a better understanding of the modus operandi of malicious hackers.
Previous challenges similar in nature have seen a large Australian contingent take part.
Another research group, the Honeynet Project, has set down a number of challenges, including the "reverse challenge" a few months ago.
Entrants in the reverse challenge competed to analyse and reverse engineer a suspicious binary file captured by a honeypot belonging to the Honeynet Project.
Not only was the binary file written by an Australian malicious hacker, but the winning entrant was also Australian.
Lance Spitzner, head of the Honeynet Project and a lead security architect with Sun Microsystems, is on the judging panel of the CITI challenge. He told ZDNet Australia he had been impressed by the skills of Australian security researchers, due to their contributions to previous challenges.
Spitzner noted that the author of the binary file the reverse challenge was analyzing had in fact entered the contest himself, finishing in the top 10.
He says that the object of the current honeyd challenge is to "...develop the awareness of honeyd and honeypots."
The security architect also hopes that the challenge will prompt further development of the honeyd software.
"Maybe someone will port it to Windows, or develop a GUI for it," he said.
The winner of the CITI honeyd challenge will win free registration at the CanSecWest security conference, and four nights accommodation. Other prizes include vouchers to Amazon.com and signed copies of Spitzner's new book "Honeypots: Tracking Hackers".
