Hardware is at the heart of any computing platform. For decades the software was considered to be more error-prone and vulnerable to attacks than hardware. At last, everybody needs to trust the CPU of her/his machine. As software became more complex and the attack surface larger, security researchers and industry have invested high effort to provide various hardware security mechanisms and components inside as well as outside the CPU, strengthening the security of modern software. However, sophisticated attacks exploiting security bugs in hardware are increasing despite the effort of the semi-conductor industry for hardware error detection and verification. This imposes a number of challenges on hardware design, implementation and evaluation requiring novel technological and educational approaches. To face the current and future challenges in secure hardware it is vital to foster a security mindset, develop programs to educate the next generation of security engineers, and bring together excellent researchers to solve complex problems. HACK@EVENT Franchise is a premier hardware security contest, a venue for computer scientists and industry experts for discovering security-critical vulnerabilities and design flaws in system-on-a-chip (SoC) and the exploitation thereof. This mimics the real-life scenario where security engineers have to find vulnerabilities in the given design.
The vulnerabilities are very diverse and can range from enabling an attacker to corrupt data to leak secret information bringing down an entire system. Given that companies will typically not share their designs in public space to be attacked by others, Intel joined hands with the Technical University of Darmstadt and Texas AMU to develop for this contest an open-source SoC that is riddled with security vulnerabilities.
Since then HACK@EVENT became a first-of-its-kind competition and a franchise that has attracted massive interest. It takes place yearly at different top security and systems venues such as USENIX Security and DAC.