President’s Cup Transition Leaves Lasting Legacy

The SEI has worked closely with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) since 2019 to develop, execute, and support the President’s Cup Cybersecurity Competition—an event that identifies, recognizes, and rewards the brightest cyber professionals in the federal, executive-branch workforce each year. The 2025 event, sixth in the series, marked a transitional year in the competition as the SEI transferred the responsibility of supporting the President’s Cup to CISA’s new vendor—a challenging transition that took place over a matter of only months.

Transitioning Novel Capabilities

Part of the SEI’s mission is to leverage its domain knowledge to create novel capabilities and to transfer its research solutions to other organizations. The institute’s work on the President’s Cup has resulted in unique federal cyber workforce development capabilities: novel cybersecurity challenges based on real-world problems to engage and test federal cybersecurity practitioners, plus a sophisticated platform and infrastructure for hosting the challenges and running the competition.

The SEI began working with the new vendor in October 2024 to prepare them to take over development, support, and operational duties during the 2025 competition, which was to begin in January. Transitioning five years of deep technical and operational knowledge in just a few months took focus and collaboration. The SEI gave CISA’s new vendor at-the-elbow training, on-demand support, and detailed documentation on how to develop challenges, run the competition, maintain the platform infrastructure, and troubleshoot challenges during play.

To ensure continuity of creative and effective challenge development, the SEI met early and often with the vendor to help them brainstorm new challenges and to mentor them on the challenge development process. The SEI taught the vendor’s infrastructure engineer how to operate the President’s Cup platform and keep it running smoothly.

Innovating Both Sides of the Competition

From the inaugural President’s Cup, which the SEI planned, developed, and orchestrated in only six months, the SEI continued to build creative challenges and immersive experiences for the different iterations of the competition. It created a 3D cyber video game for the first event, mapped all the cybersecurity challenges to tasks and work roles defined by the Workforce Framework for Cybersecurity (NICE Framework), and added a multiplayer video game with challenges for a variety of those work roles.

But the SEI also innovated and improved the platform over five years of development. In 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 a new solution for hosting the final’s video game application in the cloud. During President’s Cup 4, the SEI rearchitected the President’s Cup platform and migrated it from a Pittsburgh data center to a CISA-owned cloud environment for greater resilience.

The same year, the SEI built a robust troubleshooting capability that logged participants’ activity before the challenge environment disappeared each round. The preserved log data provided engineers a granular view of participants’ activity, and it could pay dividends in the future, according to SEI researchers involved in the President’s Cup. The data might offer a way to predict performance and aptitude, which could have broader implications for talent management and workforce development in the cybersecurity field. Analysis of this data could also uncover novel or creative solutions for solving cybersecurity challenges and inform new tactics for cybersecurity operations.

A Lasting Legacy

The SEI finalized the transition during the 2025 President’s Cup. The materials and training the SEI delivered have prepared the new vendor to succeed and build on the legacy the SEI cemented running five successful competitions: 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 players over the years have launched 31,300 cybersecurity challenges.

The SEI also leaves behind an online practice area where federal employees can replay challenges from President’s Cups 2 through 6. More than 11,500 of these challenges have been launched—equating to 9,500 hours of practice—and 52 different departments and agencies have used the area.

The President’s Cup exemplifies the SEI’s transition strategy to the government and community. SEI CERT Division experts in workforce development and cybersecurity worked with the Carnegie Mellon University community and CISA to develop a marquee event—and a lasting resource—for federal cyber workers.

Browse the collection of the SEI’s cyber readiness research in the SEI Digital Library.