Abstract
A cyber defense competition is a competition where teams compete and learn how to defend and maintain computer security. The competition provides ground to learn the real time scenarios like defending security loopholes and adding new software or services as a typical IT company would operate. The competition requires a scoring engine which can automate the process of scoring the teams. The scoring system facilitates the judges of the competition to view the scores of each team and at the same time providing the details of how the teams performed during the competition. The main goal of this project is to build a system which is a part of scoring system, which will store the network monitoring data in a database and provide a graphical user interface which shows the results based on the data stored in the database for each team participating in the competition. The network monitoring data collection is achieved using NDO (Nagios Database Objects) Utility, which is a plug-in for an open source network monitoring tool called Nagios. NDO Utilities configured along with Nagios acts as an interface which imports the network monitoring data into MySQL database. MySQL procedures are used to pull the data from the database and calculate scores for each team based on the SLA (service level agreement). The graphical user interface, developed in PHP, helps judges of Cyber defense competition to answer different questions from teams participating by providing graphical reports and email scores on frequent basis. The project also implements different architectures of NDO Utilities to handle the database failures and balancing the load on different servers. The project comes with auto installation script for the software, for future use. The software was successfully used to score cyber defense competitions held at California state university, Sacramento campus.