Russian schoolboy only contestant able to crack cryptography problem at Olympiad

MOSCOW, July 3. /TASS/. Absolute champion of the International Cybersecurity Olympiad (ICO) Daniil Melekhov revealed to TASS what it took to win the competition.

"The task I probably remember most was the cryptography problem on a Feistel network. It involves several mathematical operations that transform data in a way that encrypts it. And the private key is not disclosed. You need to decrypt the obtained data. That's pretty hard. It all comes down to theoretical mathematics, to solving a system of linear algebraic equations," Melekhov said.

He noted that the problem was worth a lot of points. "I spent about two hours on it during one of the rounds, but it was worth a boatload of points, and I solved it, out of everyone in the world. So, there's only one solution - my solution," the winner emphasized.