Call for Participations in Hardware De-obfuscation Competition


UF/FICS invites the hardware security research community to participate in the first-ever hardware de-obfuscation competition. Research in hardware obfuscation has grown significantly over the last decade. Unfortunately, many obfuscation schemes have been broken quickly since they are mostly based on figures of merit provided only by the authors. At the University of Florida (FICS Research Institute), Dynamically Obfuscated Scan Chain (DOSC) technique has been proposed recently. Rather than speculate about its resistance to attacks, we have decided to initiate a crowd-hacking based competition to evaluate it fully.

The UF/FICS Hardware De-obfuscation competition will take place at the Trusted and Assured MicroElectronics (TAME) forum at the University of Florida in late November / early December 2019 (date TBD). Past TAME forums have had over 100 attendees from government, industry, and academia. Further, this will be the final TAME event where working groups present their results and reports to the community, so it is expected to be our largest TAME ever. With the concerns about national security associated with untrusted/offshore foundries, TAME is also the perfect venue to showcase new hardware obfuscation attacks and countermeasures.
Our first multi-round competition starts next month and will focus on a scan chain obfuscation technique developed by UF/FICS called Dynamically Obfuscated Scan Chain (DOSC). Details about this technique as well as the competition can be found here (https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/946) and here (https://trust-hub.org/competitions). Aside from exposure, the competition winners will be awarded $1000+ prizes.
There are still slots open for additional red teams to participate in the competition. If you are interested, please reply to this e-mail or contact Domenic Forte (dforte@ece.ufl.edu) with the team name, team members, and university affiliations by September 2019. All universities are eligible to compete, except for UF/FICS.

Sincerely,
UF/FICS Competition Team
Domenic Forte (Lead)
Farimah Farahmandi
Yier Jin
Mark Tehranipoor