Embedded security challenge: An education initiative focusing on cybersecurity
Abstract
In this project, a red-team/blue-team cybersecurity competition, named Embedded Security Challenge (ESC), is proposed. The competition aims to engage US-based engineering students on basic and advanced concepts of cybersecurity research. The competition will be held annually, will be different every year, and will consist of three phases: Phase 1 Ð Qualification (before September): In this phase, participating teams are invited to compile a proposal that characterizes different approaches and techniques that the teams aim to implement for solving the given challenge. Phase 2 Ð Final competition (November): In the final competition phase, 2 persons from the qualified teams will be invited to present their solutions during the finals to be held during the Cyber Security Awareness Week in November at the NYU Brooklyn campus. Phase 3 - Results Dissemination: The top-3 teams will be invited to a special session in a top-tier conference or journal to disseminate their findings. The ESC competition is unique as it provides to the hardware security and trust research community access to a large pool of trust benchmarks. Effectively, the hardware community is able to leverage ESCÕs red team/blue team platform to uncover hardware-level vulnerabilities and increase assurance to hardware platforms. For the participants, ESC is a very effective security drill for building a strong security mindset and the ability to think like an attacker. ESC finalists also have direct access to recruiters ranging from sponsors, fortune 500 companies and government agencies. At the same time, sponsors have access to large pool of students with expertise in hardware security and trust. In the past, ESC has offered an anthology of Trojan benchmarks in public repositories, as well as the development of state-of-the-art detection techniques. In 2018, more than 500 Trojans have been submitted to TrustHub, along with 10 Trojan detection techniques and 5 FPGA PUFs. 26 Universities have participated with more than 100 students. Every year the competition finalists undergo extended review from industry experts and academics, and in the past, the competition findings were published in journals and in leading conferences, with a total of 39 publications as of 2018.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jul 09, 2020
- Source ID
- W911NF2010239
Entities
People
- Michail Maniatakos
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- New York University
- United States Army