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. 2021 represents ESC's 14 year anniversary. 

Past ESC competitions have focused on the security of radio frequency identification (RFID) readers, data exfiltration attacks against IoT devices, and in 2020, hacking the firmware of a wifi access point running on a RISC-V IoT platform using open-source reverse engineering tools.

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competition timeline

2020 competition

Congratulations to our 2020 Finalists & Winners

competition organizers

The competition is organized under the supervision of Assistant Professor Nektarios Tsoutsos and the global challenge leads at the University of Delaware.