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A team of George Mason University students joined with students from the University of Florida (UF) in June to take first prize at Hack@DAC 2025 in San Francisco.
Sai Manoj, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), said the cross-university relationship emerged from a chance meeting he had with Swarup Bhunia, a professor at UF. “He’s well known in hardware security. We were discussing different ideas, and he was interested in what we are working on. And of course, we were also interested in what they were doing. So we decided to do a pilot collaboration.”
The Gatriots—a portmanteau of “Gators” and “Patriots”—took first place in a field of eight teams from around the world after they toiled around–the-clock to find bugs and vulnerabilities implanted in Google’s OpenTitan. The team comprised Raghul Saravanan and Jayanth Thangellamudi, ECE PhD students and advised by Manoj, and PhD students Sudipta Paria and Aritra Dasgupta of UF, advised by Bhunia.
It is common in the hack-a-thon world for contestants to work through the night on the contest’s challenge; in this case, the team logged almost 48 continuous hours. Saravanan said this element of the challenge is to represent the real world. “Attackers attack your hardware systems, and you try to rectify it within the shortest amount of time. We are given real-world hardware designs and real-world applications and what they gave us for the hardware bugs is going to appear in the real world. It is indeed important you find as many bugs as possible within the shortest time.”
After Hack@DAC, the Gatriots placed well at Hack@CHES in Kuala Lumpur in September. In this hybrid event, the Florida students traveled to Malaysia, while the George Mason students helped from Fairfax. Even with the time difference, the two sets of students managed a second-place finish.
George Mason students are developing a reputation in the hack-a-thon world, finishing strong in competitions around the globe. “Mason is excelling because of its R1 category research and because much of our work focuses on advancing secured computing,” Saravanan said.
Manoj added, “Specifically, ECE has a strong background in hardware security, with numerous grants in that field.” Combine faculty expertise, the right opportunities, and student grit and talent, and George Mason students will be hacking their way to the top for some time to come.
About Hack@DAC:
The contest was held in conjunction with the Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2025, a premier electronic design automation event, with over 2000 participants. The hack-a-thon was co-organized by Intel, Synopsys, Siemens, Technical University of Darmstadt, and Texas A&M University.