FPT University students have just won the first prize and a number of awards at the NSUCRYPTO 2025 International Code Olympic Competition - a competition on toanistics and cryptography with the participation of candidates from more than 40 countries.
NSUCRYPTO is known for its exam structure combining traditional olympic problems and open, unresolved challenges. Teams must solve many types of exercises, from exploiting web application vulnerabilities, analyzing software source code, finding errors in server applications, to investigating digital traces and solving cryptographic problems. The exam covers many areas of modern cryptography, such as block encryption, public keywords, and cryptographic analysis, requiring candidates to have both solid background knowledge and logical thinking and creativity.
This year's competition takes place online. In the individual content, Nguyen Thanh Danh - student of course K18, majoring in Information Security (FPT University), excellently overcame the challenges to win the First Prize in the competition related to theoretical problems of cryptography and applied mathematics.
In addition, Tran Quang Quan - a student of the K18 course, majoring in Information Security (FPT University) also won the Third Prize, demonstrating his thinking ability and ability to solve complex problems accurately and creatively.
In the team event, which required candidates to solve in-depth research problems combined with programs, the group of students from FPT K18 University majoring in Information Security Tran Quang Quan, Vu Quang Huy and Nguyen Thanh Danh demonstrated their research capacity, problem analysis ability and effective teamwork spirit to bring home the Third Prize in the final round.
Sharing about his experience in the exam, Nguyen Thanh Danh said that time pressure is the biggest challenge, as cryptographic problems require many analysis steps in limited time.
"What puts me under the most pressure during the exam is the time factor. Long password problems require many steps of reasoning, so I have to carefully calculate which exam to do first and which exam to abandon. Sometimes finding a solution but not enough time to implement, it feels very stressful. However, it is this pressure that helps me practice my prioritization skills, handle quickly and keep a strong spirit" - Danh said.
Tran Quang Quan shared: "In the individual round, the biggest difficulty is the race against time, when we have to solve 9 in-depth questions in just 4 and a half hours. The next day, we continued the team competition round, where we had to read and understand research papers and convert them into solutions by programming or proposing research directions. Thanks to clear work assignment, coordination and mutual trust, we have overcome our own limits and achieved this result".
The NSUCRYPTO International Code Olympic Competition has been held annually since 2014 by leading universities and research institutes in Russia, Belarus and Belgium, including Novosibirsk State University, Sobolev Institute of Mathematics, Belarusian State University, Tomsk State University and KU Leuven.
This is the only cryptographic Olympic competition with scientific problems for experts and university students of any country. The goal is to attract the participation of young researchers in solving difficult and curious scientific problems of modern cryptography.
