What does it take to win a hardware security competition? The top three winners from the HACK@DAC competition, including two Ph.D. candidates from NYU’s Center for Cybersecurity, provided some insights on the topic in a recent interview for the podcast “What That Means with Camille,” part of Intel’s Cyber Security Inside series.

Baleegh Ahmad and Animesh Chowdhury represented the first and third place winning teams in the competition, which was held in connection with the Design Automation Conference last December. Ahmad and his team members, Dr. Benjamin Tan and Abdul Khader Thalakkattu Moosa of NYU, and Wei-Kai Liu from Duke University, took first place, while third-place winner Chowdhury was a team of one, with support from Dr, Ramesh Karri.

In the video, produced by Intel and available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fBfS163oDg, Ahmad, Chowdhury, and second place team representative Orlando Arias from the University of Florida, answered questions about strategy and solving the challenges of the competition itself.