Pwn.college is an open-access cybersecurity education platform maintained by a team of hackers at Arizona State University. The platform uses a dojo-inspired belt ranking system to guide learners through cybersecurity training, starting new users at “white belt” status and progressing them toward advanced expertise.
According to the platform’s website, pwn.college is free and open to participation for interested people worldwide. The platform currently powers much of ASU’s cybersecurity curriculum and is used to grade students at universities around the globe. The learning approach emphasizes hands-on practice, involving users directly with terminal operations, CPU instruction manipulation, and network-level work rather than theoretical instruction alone.
The platform’s challenges are designed as educational material, and ASU explicitly requests that users refrain from posting writeups, walkthrough videos, or livestreams of challenge solutions online to preserve the platform’s viability as an educational resource.
Educational institutions can integrate pwn.college into their programs by creating private dojos for their students, either using the platform’s existing challenges or adding their own. Educators can use pwn.college’s videos and slides freely for non-commercial purposes with attribution. The developers invite institutions using the platform to contact them, noting that evidence of widespread educational use would support their academic careers.
Conferences interested in hosting pwn.college as an intense weekend-long training component can reach out to the team directly.
The platform’s progression extends beyond its own challenges. According to the site, learners advancing to brown belt status become capable of contributing meaningfully to the cybersecurity industry and academia. The next level, black belt status, represents graduation to hacking mastery, though this achievement “must happen outside of the dojo (for now).” The platform suggests graduates pursue Capture The Flag competitions, wargames, and other advanced learning platforms like CryptoHack and OST2, as well as potential cybersecurity research internships at ASU.
The infrastructure powering pwn.college is open source, and the team welcomes pull requests and issues. Some modules remain closed-source due to containing solution scripts, but others are available on GitHub. The team invites educators and trusted collaborators to contribute to module development and slide creation.
Key facts
- Pwn.college is free, world-accessible, and maintained by Arizona State University hackers
- The platform uses a belt-ranking system from white belt (beginner) through black belt (mastery)
- It powers much of ASU’s cybersecurity curriculum and is used by universities globally
- ASU requests users not post challenge solutions online to keep the platform viable for education
- Educational institutions can create private dojos within pwn.college for their students
- The platform’s infrastructure is open source and welcomes contributions