Good news everyone! The location and dates for the public edition of “Advanced Tool Development with SMT Solvers” have been settled and are as follows:

New York, August 15th-17th
London, August, 22nd-24th

The full details, including pricing can be found here, while the syllabus is here. I’ve been teaching this class since early 2013 to private groups so I’m quite looking forward to a public edition. If you’re interested in bug finding, RE, exploit dev or more general automated program analysis, and want an exercise-driven introduction to SMT-based analyses, then send an email to contact@vertex.re to reserve your place now. There’s an early-bird discount available until April 29th (UPDATE: deadline extended until May 13th!), and further discounts available for groups, so drop me an email for a quote!

Now, for the other part of this post: there will be a seat at each training* up for grabs for full-time students** who are not otherwise employed. I considered a few different options for ‘challenges’ but, realistically, I would much rather see what fun things people have come up with on their own, than go over responses to a contrived challenge I have come up with. So, we’re going to go with something simple (and hassle-free for everyone involved!): published something awesome in the past 6 months? Great! Send an email with a link to contact@vertex.re and whomever makes me go “Well that’s f**king awesome!” with the greatest degree of enthusiasm wins. Simple.

Ideally, your entry will have something to do with program analysis, bug finding, exploit dev, RE and such things, but use your imagination here. GitHub repos, blog posts, bug reports, exploits, academic papers, CTF write-ups, and so on, are all fair game.

To enter, send the following to contact@vertex.re:

• A link to a write-up, paper or code, which has been published in the past 6 months
• Your name
• The university/college at which you are enrolled, and the title of the programme***
• Which location (NYC or London) you can make it to

The contest will run until April 29th (UPDATE: deadline extended until May 13th) and I’ll notify the winners shortly thereafter.

* Just so it’s clear: students will still be responsible for their own travel, accommodation and all other costs except for the cost of the training.

** In order to take the most from the course you will still need to meet the minimum requirements set out in the syllabus. In short: you’ll need a solid grasp of Python, and be comfortable reading plenty of x86 assembly.

*** If you win we’ll also need some proof that you are in fact enrolled in this programme full-time.