SEI Support for President's Cup Leaves Lasting Legacy

• Article
January 21, 2025—Each year the President’s Cup Cybersecurity Competition identifies and rewards the best cyber professionals in the federal, executive-branch workforce. Since the first event in 2019, the Software Engineering Institute’s (SEI) CERT Division has helped the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) create and update the competition’s platform, challenges, and infrastructure.
The conclusion of the fifth competition in April 2024 marked the beginning of the transition of President’s Cup support from the SEI to CISA. The agency’s new vendor will take over after the SEI runs the first round of the sixth event, which started on January 7. At this moment of change, the SEI looks back on more than five years of collaboration and innovation that created a unique cyber workforce development capability.
President’s Cup History
Inaugural President’s Cup, 2019
In response to Executive Order 13870, CISA selected the SEI to orchestrate the inaugural President’s Cup. In just 6 months, the SEI created a White House-approved plan, developed 82 challenges, created a fully functional competition platform, and collaborated with Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center to develop a 3D cyber video game for the finals. More than 1,000 individuals and 200 teams registered for the competition, which culminated with a livestreamed, in-person final round.
President’s Cup 2, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic forced a mid-competition pivot from an in-person to online final round of competition, which required the SEI to devise an innovative solution for hosting the final’s video game application in the cloud. In addition, the SEI mapped all the cybersecurity challenges to tasks and work roles defined by the Workforce Framework for Cybersecurity, also known as the NICE Framework.
President’s Cup 3, 2021
The SEI developed an all-new set of challenges and improved the competition platform to make the challenge development process more efficient. Additionally, the SEI released 57 of the President’s Cup 3 challenges as open source software, including the challenge artifacts, guides, and solutions.
President’s Cup 4, 2022
The SEI rearchitected the President’s Cup platform and migrated it from SEI’s data center in Pittsburgh to a CISA-owned cloud environment. This redesign and migration gave the competition platform greater resilience. For the team finals, the SEI added a multiplayer video game called Cubespace, which presented challenges for a variety of work roles such as Cyber Defense Forensic Analyst, Cyber Defense Incident Responder, and Exploitation Analyst. The source code for the game and for the previous years’ challenges was made available on GitHub.
President’s Cup 5, 2024
The SEI developed an online practice area for the President’s Cup platform where federal employees can replay challenges from President’s Cups 3, 4, and 5. Since the practice area was implemented, more than 11,500 challenges have been launched—equating to 9,500 hours of practice—and the area has been used by 52 different departments and agencies. Finally, the SEI produced a President’s Cup Through the Years video on behalf of CISA.
A Lasting Legacy
The SEI leaves behind a legacy of more than 300 hands-on challenges, 3 video games, and a fully featured and open sourced training and competition platform. In total, 5,800 participants from 55 departments and agencies have competed in the President’s Cup, and 31,300 cybersecurity challenges have been launched by players over the years. That legacy also includes documentation and instructional videos that capture the knowledge the SEI and CISA learned along the way, which remains available for others to build on.
As a federally funded research and development center, the SEI’s mission is to transition new technology and techniques to the government and community. SEI CERT Division experts in workforce development and cybersecurity leveraged the SEI’s membership in the CMU community and strong mission partnership with CISA. Together they developed the technical infrastructure, creative assets, and event architecture that made the President’s Cup Cybersecurity Competition a marquee event—and a lasting resource—for federal cyber workers.
Browse a new collection of the SEI’s cyber readiness research in the SEI Digital Library.