Two engineering doctoral students on winning team of international cybersecurity event
MANHATTAN — Two doctoral students in electrical and computer engineering at Kansas State University were part of a four-member team that won the 2022 HACK@SEC virtual cybersecurity event.
Weimin Fu and Zhaoxiang Liu, doctoral students in the Mike Wiegers Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, were part of the Gator Hawk Cat Community team that won the event. Michael Lee and Ruochen Dai, both from the University of Florida, rounded out the four-member team that took first place after finishing as runner-up a year ago.
HACK@SEC bills itself as the world's largest hardware security "capture the flag" competition and was held this year in conjunction with the USENIX security conference. The Gator Hawk Cat Community beat out 25 teams from around the world.
"I was pleased to see our team take first place after finishing in second place last year," said Xiaolong Guo, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and K-State's advisor to the team. "To perform this well at one of the world's largest hardware security competitions is a credit to the hard work of our team and its members."
Both Fu and Liu work in Guo's hardware security laboratory in the electrical and computer engineering department. Fu, who hails from Jilin, China, examines possible risks and faults in hardware designs using his own design code analysis tools to prevent irreversible design flaws in final products. Liu, from Beijing, China, has focused his research on the formal verification of hardware, analyzing the intermediate representation of the hardware design and using the solver to check the potential vulnerability of hardware.
