Priya Patel
TLDR:
- Intel organizes hardware hackathons like Hack@DAC to tackle vulnerabilities and raise awareness.
- These events bring together security professionals to find and share hardware vulnerabilities.
The article discusses how Intel has been using hackathons to address hardware vulnerabilities in semiconductor chips. The company started organizing events like Hack@DAC to raise awareness about hardware-based vulnerabilities and promote the need for more detection tools. By bringing together security professionals from academia and industry partners, Intel has been able to discover vulnerabilities, develop mitigation methods, and perform root cause analysis of issues found. The goal is to encourage chip designers to focus on designing silicon more securely.
Through collaborations with universities like Texas A&M and Technical University of Darmstadt, Intel has created a common framework for detecting and sharing information on hardware vulnerabilities. Additionally, Intel has partnered with MITRE’s Common Weakness Enumeration team to bring more focus to hardware vulnerabilities and address the gap in identifying root causes of these issues. This collaboration has led to improved tooling, with companies like Cycuity claiming their Radix tool can now identify 80% of known hardware weaknesses.
As semiconductor manufacturers focus on adding designs that support new AI capabilities, the interest in identifying weaknesses closer to hardware design has grown. Efforts like the OpenTitan Project, an open-source reference design for securing root of trust chips, have also contributed to improving hardware security. Overall, Intel’s hackathon initiatives and collaborations have led to advancements in detecting and mitigating hardware vulnerabilities in semiconductor chips.
