A student team representing the Warren B. Nelms Institute won 2nd Place in the HACK@CHES 2025 Competition. Team CapitalGators was 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.
“We’re absolutely thrilled to be crowned as the second-place winners of HACK@CHES’25!” said Sudipta Paria. “This competition challenged us to put our creative minds to work and demanded real technical prowess. Through the bug identification efforts on the OpenTitan SoC, we gained hands-on insight into real-world vulnerabilities. We’re proud to have stood out among such brilliant minds. Massive thanks to the organizers and judges for making this an unforgettable and truly inspiring experience.”
HACK@CHES 2025 consisted of two phases. The live competition phase was held September 13-18, 2025 at the Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Nine teams from countries around the world participated in the final round. The teams received an SoC design with planted security vulnerabilities. The objective is to 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 Hack@CHES
HackTheSilicon is the world’s largest and most prestigious hardware security competition, co-located with leading technical conferences such as DATE, DAC, USENIX, and CHES. As hardware and firmware become increasingly critical to our digital infrastructure, the risks associated with their vulnerabilities grow ever more serious. From data breaches to full system compromise, hardware-level flaws can jeopardize everything from individual devices to national security.
To tackle these pressing challenges, HACK@CHES brings together the brightest minds from academia and industry in a high-stakes, real-world security competition designed to uncover, exploit, and mitigate hardware vulnerabilities.