The Hack@DAC Story: Learnings from Organizing the World's Largest Hardware Hacking Competition

This Black Hat conference talk explores the insights and lessons learned from organizing Hack@DAC, the world's largest hardware hacking competition that has hosted over 1,000 researchers across seven years. Discover what makes Hack@DAC unique compared to other hardware CTFs and understand its value to the broader security community, with specific takeaways for industry professionals, academics, and security researchers. Learn about the recent spike in hardware vulnerabilities and cross-layer attacks, and how Hack@DAC addresses the scarcity of open hardware designs that document known vulnerabilities and mitigations by offering open-source hardware designs with simulation environments that mirror real-world system-on-chip security features and weaknesses. Gain insights into the competition's organization strategies, including how target designs are selected, security features are implemented, and vulnerabilities are deliberately inserted. The 38-minute presentation, delivered by experts from Intel Corporation and academia, also covers the competition's two-phase structure and its significant impact on the security research community.