Friday is competition day across the CSAW landscape, with all five event sites running a variety of activities that test skill in both attacking and defending computer software and hardware.

In Brooklyn, the competitions will include the finals of the Embedded Security Challenge, Hack 3D, Logic Locking, and the Applied Research  and Policy competitions, as well as the debut of the AI Hardware Attack (AHA) Challenge and the LLM Attack Challenge. AHA asks competitors to insert a hardware vulnerability, such as a trojan or backdoor, into an open-source digital design with the help of generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT, Bard, or similar). In a similar vein, competitors in the LLM Attack Challenge will use generative large language models (e.g. ChatGPT, WizardCoder, Bard, or similar), to insert a software vulnerability into the previous Capture the Flag competition scenarios as a novel approach to solve the CTF challenges.

In addition to the NYU Center for Cybersecurity, CSAW competitions for the US-Canada site are organized by the NYU Center for Global Affairs (Policy Competition), NYU Tandon Dept. of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (Hack3D Competition), and the University of Delaware Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Embedded Security Challenge).

The NYU Abu Dhabi site, headquarters for the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region events, will also introduce a new competition on this day as well. The BioHack 3D competition asks participants to “brainstorm ingenious attacks on biochips, cunningly designed to slip past post-manufacturing security checks unnoticed.” The MENA event will also include the Capture The Flag and Applied Research competitions, as well as the Hack my Robot contest that was successfully introduced last year. 

The European site at Grenoble INP – Esisar in Valence, France will host four competitions, including a Red Team competition for high school students. The CSAW India site at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur will host three competitions virtually, while CSAW Mexico at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City will host two online competitions.

To register for CSAW ’23, go to https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe-UjVeSHZolh084vNcku5_pPSV6GIRwKXJvVaxJxITDb-Ajg/viewform.