​ESC is an educational, research-oriented tournament aimed at hacking into the hardware of embedded systems. First run in 2008, it is the oldest hardware security competition in the world. 2022 represents ESC's 15 year anniversary.

Past ESC competitions have focused on data exfiltration attacks against IoT devices, hacking the firmware of a RISC-V wifi access point and executing side channel/fault injection attacks using a popular ChipWhisperer board.

This year's ESC focuses on machine learning-based attacks in both edge and cloud computing. Machine learning cloud services are used by millions of users every day, and special care needs to be taken to ensure trained models are protected from malicious users. This year, teams will investigate a range of attacks (such as model leakage) on the machine learning models hosted on a cloud server using a remote Raspberry Pi virtual device.