ECE PhD Students Win 3rd Place at Embedded Security Challenge (ECS) at the CSAW 2020 Conference
ECE PhD students Wenhao Wang, Shijin Duan, and Yukui Luo, advised by Professor Xiaolin Xu, recently participated in the Embedded Security Challenge (ECS) at the CSAW 2020 conference, placing 3rd in the US-Canada region.
CSAW [see-SAH] is the most comprehensive student-run cybersecurity event in the world, featuring 10 hacking competitions, workshops, and industry events. Final events are hosted by 6 global regions, including participants from Europe, mena, India, Mexico, Israel, and us-can.
Embedded Security Challenge (ECS) is an educational, research-oriented tournament aimed at hacking into the hardware of embedded systems. First run in 2008, it is the oldest hardware security competition in the world. 2020 represents ESC’s 13 year anniversary. Past ESC competitions have focused on the security of radio frequency identification (RFID) readers and data exfiltration attacks against IoT devices.
This year’s ESC focuses on the security of the Internet of Things (IoT), which are embedded devices with network connectivity. IoT devices are part of most modern smart infrastructures with an estimate of over 20 billion IoT devices connected today. ESC 2020 will task contestants with hacking the firmware of a wifi access point running on a RISC-V IoT platform using open-source reverse engineering tools.