When research and development challenges are as much fun as a spy movie, everyone wins, said a group of Iowa State University graduate students and their faculty advisor. They experienced the thrill of (virtually) saving the human race and came out the winners of a national James Bond-like "hardware hacking" cyber security competition.

The team of graduate students ousted their peers from Carnegie Mellon University, Hoftstra University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Arkansas, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Virginia Tech and Yale University, among others, to secure the win at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in mid-October.

Recruited for the competition by assistant professor Joseph Zambreno, the ISU students competed against other teams to "save the world" from the evil Orange Army and its plans to manufacture an encryption device as part of its plot to destroy humanity. The teams worked at a fictional manufacturing plant secured by the evil organization to fabricate the device. Their best hope for foiling the sinister plot was placing Trojans (undetectable pieces of code) in the device's hardware.

Zambreno, whose research specialty is in secure hardware platforms, served as the group's faculty adviser. He said the scenario is not so far-fetched.
      
"Trojan circuits are intended to look innocuous," but they can be designed to secretly perform a host of unauthorized functions.

Hardware security has become a national security issue, he said, because the electronic chips in devices such as devices the U.S. Department of Defense uses are no longer made solely in America. Research, especially in the area of hardware Trojans, is becoming a high-stakes priority.

Weeks before the competition, Zambreno prospected graduate students from a group of "mad scientist types." The five students who were willing to creatively attack the problem included three on-campus students: Alex Baumgarten, Michael Steffen and Matt Clausman, and two distance-education graduate students.

Zambreno said after weeks of brainstorming, the team culled eight top ideas to implement, write up and present, from a "breadth of attacks" designed to be undetectable by typical end-users.

Their successful Trojan relied on special AM radio frequencies and LED lights.

In the end, the team's solution to the problem and the quality of its presentation put them in first place.

"It was an eye opener to realize that a couple of masters students a month into their first semester could hack the system," Baumgarten said. "On the other hand, it speaks well of our undergraduate education."

Zambreno, said he plans to enlist students for similar competitions in the future.

"Contests are great motivators, and the solutions that come from them are extremely valuable."

"We hope to be part of the solution to prevent such (cyber security) attacks from getting out of the box," Baumgarten said. "The competition was fun and motivating, but it's much more rewarding to know our research could prevent that sort of scenario from ever happening."