Two teams from NYU Tandon captured second and third place honors in the 2020 HACK@DAC competition, an annual hardware security competition held in tandem with the Design Automation Conference. The team of Yiyang Xu, Shanling Li and Animesh Basak Chowdhury took second place, while Juan Villegas, Shivam Gupta, and Matthew Lee took third place. The NYU winners worked on their winning solution as the final project in Dr. Ramesh Karri’s hardware security class in the Spring.

The competition challenges participants to develop practical and effective solutions and computer-aided tools to identify vulnerabilities in System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designs. Such designs utilize third-party intellectual property (3PIP) cores and in-house IP cores, so their trustworthiness can be undermined by security bugs unintentionally introduced during integration.  

The final phase of the competition was held virtually during the conference, which  ran from July 20-24.