CHES Challenge

Since 2015, a crypto-engineering challenge is organized every year in cooperation with CHES. Former editions have focused on practical side-channel attacks, design of countermeasures, deep learning-based attacks, hardware security and white-box cryptography.

This year the CHES Challenge has two tracks:

1. GE Wars: a deep learning side-channel analysis challenge,
2. HACK@CHES 2025: a hardware security challenge.

GE Wars: The Deep Learning SCA battle

Since 2015, CHES has hosted annual crypto-engineering challenges pushing the boundaries of applied cryptographic research. The 2025 edition introduces GE Wars, a Deep Learning Side-Channel Analysis (DL-SCA) challenge targeting a real-world AES implementation!

Think your model can recover secret keys from noisy electromagnetic traces? Want to benchmark your DL-SCA techniques against the community? This challenge is for you!

The GE Wars Challenge focuses on profiled attacks (template or deep learning-based) against an unprotected AES C implementation running on a Raspberry Pi 4B. This introduces jitter and noise, raising the bar for traditional attack strategies and inviting novel DL-based solutions.

Goal

Participants are invited to act as attackers, creating models capable of extracting the secret key with fewer traces than the provided baseline.

Challenge Overview

The challenge runs from June 15 to August 15, 2025 and includes:

• A provided EM trace dataset (~250K profiling, ~100K attack traces)
• A shared task: Recovering one AES S-box output byte with minimal traces (using Guessing Entropy)
• Continuous public leaderboard
• Final results and possible Rump Session spotlight at CHES 2025

Prize

Winners earn recognition in the community and a 2000$ cash award.

For more information and to access the dataset:

HACK@CHES’25

HackTheSilicon is the world’s largest and most prestigious hardware security competition, co-located with leading technical conferences such as DATE, DAC, USENIX, and CHES. As hardware and firmware become increasingly critical to our digital infrastructure, the risks associated with their vulnerabilities grow ever more serious. From data breaches to full system compromise, hardware-level flaws can jeopardize everything from individual devices to national security.

To tackle these pressing challenges, HACK@CHES brings together the brightest minds from academia and industry in a high-stakes, real-world security competition designed to uncover, exploit, and mitigate hardware vulnerabilities.

What Is HackTheSilicon?

Since its launch in 2018, HackTheSilicon has served as a cutting-edge platform to test, advance, and showcase hardware security techniques. Co-developed by academic and industry leaders, this global competition fosters innovation and builds critical bridges between research and practical application.

Returning to the Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES) for its second edition as HACK@CHES’25, the competition continues to push the boundaries of collaborative, hands-on hardware security.

New this year: Participants are encouraged to bring their edge in AI. The use of advanced machine learning techniques and large language models (LLMs) is officially allowed, unlocking new possibilities for vulnerability discovery, exploit generation, and automated patching.

The Challenge

In a simulated real-world setting, teams act as security engineers, uncovering critical flaws in a specially crafted, vulnerable open-source SoC, co-designed by industry and academic experts. These vulnerabilities span a wide range —from data corruption to sensitive information leakage— offering a realistic and multifaceted security challenge.

Participants will:

• Discover and document security vulnerabilities.
• Develop exploits to demonstrate these weaknesses.
• Propose mitigation strategies and patches.
• Submit comprehensive, professional reports on their findings.

Who Can Compete?

HACK@CHES’25 is open to teams from academia, industry, or hybrid collaborations. Each team will be provided a modified version of the OpenTitan SoC with deliberately inserted vulnerabilities. Your mission:

• Identify and analyze flaws.
• Evaluate their impact.
• Create practical exploits.
• Propose robust and potentially automatable mitigations.

Participants may use any tools or techniques at their disposal, including LLMs and ML-based static or dynamic analysis tools. Submissions will be judged on the depth of analysis, exploit quality, and the effectiveness and creativity of proposed mitigations.

Competition Structure: Two Phases

• Phase 1 (May 28 — July 7): All registered teams analyze the SoC and submit their findings.
• Phase 2 (September 13—14): The top teams from Phase 1 advance to a live, high-stakes final round at CHES 2025.

Why Join?

• Tackle real-world hardware security threats.
• Collaborate with leading experts and peers across the globe.
• Push the frontier with AI-enhanced analysis.
• Gain international recognition in a prestigious HACK@CHES’25.
• Compete for valuable prizes totalling up to $2000.

Celebrate Innovation

Winners will be honored at the prestigious CHES award ceremony, spotlighting their technical excellence and their contributions to the future of secure hardware systems.

Are you ready to outsmart the silicon? Bring your skills, your tools, and your team to HACK@CHES’25—and make your mark on the future of secure computing.

For more information and registration, visit:

CHES Challenge Contact

matthieu.rivain@cryptoexperts.com