In this year's competition, teams are challenged to use generative AI to both insert hardware Trojans into FPGA-targeted hardware designs as well as demonstrate exploits for these new Trojans. The target of this competition is the Hackster board from Calico Computer, an education-focused device which includes an application microprocessor, an FPGA, and additional peripherals aimed at hardware security education.

Teams will need to reverse-engineer the FPGA bitstream provided for the Hackster board and use that, along with basic integration documentation and tests, to determine how the hardware design works and add a Trojan to it.

A preliminary qualifying round of the competition will take place across two weeks, from 18 September to 2 October. Finalists will be selected by 4 October. These teams will be brought to New York to attend CSAW in-person. The final challenge will be given at CSAW and will take place over 24 hours, where teams will be given access to the physical Hackster boards to both demonstrate their preliminary Trojans and complete the final challenge on the hardware.

Think Like an Attacker. Challenge a Deep-Learning QR-Code Authenticator.

BioHACK3D 2026 puts you against an AI-powered physical-authentication system built to recognize genuine melt-electrowritten QR codes (MEW-QRCs).

Your Challenge

Explore the authentication pipeline, probe its weaknesses, and determine how robust the DL-based verifier really is.

• Work with MEW-QRC image datasets provided by the organizers. 
• Examine the microscopic and morphological features that drive authentication. 
• Apply ideas from computer vision, image processing, AI/ML/DL, and adversarial learning. 
• Investigate how image manipulation, counterfeiting, cloning, noise, deformation, or other physical and imaging variations may influence the verifier. 
• Develop a creative and realistic strategy for challenging the DL-based authentication decision. 
• Evaluate your approach in terms of attack effectiveness, computational cost, latency, scalability, and practical feasibility. 

The Goal

Can you find a weakness in the authentication pipeline and exploit it convincingly enough to challenge the AI's decision?

Bring your computer-vision skills, adversarial-ML ideas, cybersecurity mindset, and creativity to BioHACK3D 2026.

Find the weakness. Challenge the model. Test the limits of AI-powered physical authentication.

Have your solution evaluated by experts in AI, 3D printing, biochip security, and cyber-physical systems.

The Cyber Reasoning Challenge (CRC) is an AIxCC-style competition in which student teams design a cyber reasoning system (CRS) to find and patch vulnerabilities in real software targets. Unlike a traditional CTF, teams do not solve challenges by hand. Their CRS must autonomously discover a crashing proof of vulnerability and produce a patch that compiles, preserves the program’s intended behavior, and actually fixes the bug rather than hiding a single crash.

To keep the event focused on system design, we have used the evaluation infrastructure from Team Atlanta, the first-place team in DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge. Teams therefore do not need to build the evaluation pipeline, scoring, or target-harnessing stack from scratch. They can spend their time on the CRS itself: how it searches, localizes, and repairs bugs.

We also provide a starter kit with two working CRS baseline (codex and claude code). Teams can run it out of the box to understand the workflow, then replace or extend the finder and patcher with their own components. 

Challenges use two scan modes. In a delta scan, the vulnerable change is provided as a diff. In a full scan, the complete vulnerable project is provided without a localization hint. The inaugural event focuses on C and C++ targets.