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

Hardware bugs are significantly harder and more expensive to fix compared to software bugs, with limited tools available for detection

The Hack@DAC competition provides a realistic open-source system-on-chip design with security features and vulnerabilities for participants to find and exploit

Competition has helped develop security mindsets in hardware design teams and fostered innovation in hardware security tooling at the RTL (Register Transfer Level) phase

Framework is being used by researchers to create new security testing tools and methodologies, including automated bug detection and formal verification approaches

Competition attracts diverse participants from academia, industry and security research across different expertise areas (design, verification, security)

Competition structure includes two phases:

• Phase 1: 2-month offline bug hunting period
• Phase 2: Live 33-hour finals at the conference for top 10 teams

Winning teams have published research in IEEE journals and received job opportunities at major chip design companies

Framework has contributed to MITRE’s hardware Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) database with over 110 types of hardware vulnerabilities

Competition emphasizes “shift left” approach - finding and fixing security issues early in the design process before chip manufacturing

Has expanded awareness of hardware security vulnerabilities and testing across academia, industry and adjacent technical domains like firmware development