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, 2024 represents ESC's 17-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 side channel attacks (SCA) on cyber-physical systems (CPS). Cyber-physical systems are used by hundreds of industries and in many critical infrastructure systems. If these CPSs are not properly setup they can leak information even if they are using cryptographically secure software. This year, teams will investigate a range of SCAs on an Arduino Uno based CPS running several firmware that expose various side channels.

 

The event comprises a qualification and a competition phase where teams will be able to explore several variations of a CPS and exploit side channels they find while suggesting mitigations for the found exploits.