Participating teams will be tasked with leveraging AI tools, such as LLMs, to insert and exploit hardware vulnerabilities and Trojans for various open-source hardware designs. These can include cryptographic accelerators, processors, communication IPs, etc.

Each month leading up to the in-person final at CSAW, a new challenge (or challenges) will be issued. Each of these challenges will remain available for the duration of the competition until the finalist teams are selected so new teams can join at any time. At the conclusion of each month’s challenges, a winning team will be selected and awarded a small hardware prize.

Potential challenges could include:

• Inserting a Trojan that can evade detection by state of the art security analysis tools and models. 
• Modifying security checks to allow a Trojan-infected hardware module to pass verification.
• Modifying a design to make it more vulnerable to potential side-channel attacks.

All challenges must be completed using AI tools and all information regarding those tools must be submitted, including complete and detailed logs of their use, i.e. if an LLM is being used, we require all conversations with the model be submitted.