Flatbush team wins national hardware hacking competition

If you want to load a virus onto a computer chip meant to wreck a geothermal plant, we know the guys who could do it. They probably wouldn’t do it, but they are the best ones to figure out how.

Flatbush’s MoMa Avengers, made up of Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos and Charalambos Konstantinou, won the 2013 CSAW competition in Embedded Systems. In 2011, Prof. Michail Maniatakos, the head of the lab that the team came from, also won the same competition. The competition judge’s plans to load malicious code onto chips meant to run important hardware.

Tsoutsos said of his team’s success, “This also motivates me to work harder in the field of Hardware Security in general, since there are still several open problems that need our attention. This win is meant to raise awareness for everyone to the fact that computer chips can sometimes be compromised and hackers may maliciously change the original designs to steal private information.”

We wrote more about Tsoutsos and Konstantinou’s work earlier this week.