A student team from Professor Bhunia’s lab won 1st Place in the HACK@DAC 2025 Competition. Team Gatotriots is comprised of Nelms Institute PhD students Sudipta Paria and Aritra Dasgupta, advised by Dr. Swarup Bhunia, and George Mason University PhD students Raghul Saravanan and Jayanth Thangellamudi, advised by Dr. Sai Manoj P D.
HACK@DAC is a security competition focusing on System-on-Chip (SoC) Security. HACK@DAC 2025 consisted of two phases. The live competition phase was held June 22-25, 2025 at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in San Francisco, CA. Participating teams can be from industry, academia, or a combination. The teams received an SoC design with planted security vulnerabilities. They must identify these vulnerabilities, assess their impact, provide exploits, and propose mitigation. The teams can use any tool or technique and provide a detailed report on their findings.
ABOUT HackTheSilicon:
HackTheSilicon is the premier hardware security contest where computer scientists and industry experts explore security vulnerabilities in system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs. Intel, in collaboration with the Technical University of Darmstadt and Texas AMU, developed an open-source SoC for the competition, replicating real-world scenarios for security engineers. The event has evolved into a first-of-its-kind competition and franchise, drawing massive interest. Join us annually at renowned security and systems venues like USENIX Security and DAC.