- Registration with HotCRP system deadline: 22 September 2020
- Qualification reports due in HotCRP: 22 September 2020
- Announcement of teams qualified to the final phase: 24 September 2020
- Final reports and associated computer files due in HotCRP: 31 October 2020
(All deadlines are 11:59 pm eastern US timezone)
For the virtual finals of the competition in each region, the teams will be asked to present, discuss, and demonstrate their challenge solutions on the RISC-V board. Teams are responsible for any additional equipment their techniques require.
The RISC-V boards and firmware will be provided to the finalist teams after the conclusion of the qualification round.
For the qualification phase, each participating team must upload a written report to the HotCRP system in PDF file format following the standard IEEE conference format (10pt font, double column, letter size paper, not compsoc mode); templates are available here (LaTeX template is preferred). The qualification phase PDF report can be up to 4 pages, including references and appendices.
For the final phase, each qualified team must upload a final PDF report to the HotCRP system, along with a TAR.GZ file that includes all associated computer files and documentation for the implemented exploits. Final reports should follow the format of a technical paper, discussing attack implementation, findings, and any relevant documentation of all the approaches/techniques and exploits that will be demonstrated during the finals. Information pertaining to any assumptions the contestants make, thorough technical discussion, and points that address all the grading criteria must be included in the reports, in a structured manner. We encourage contestants to also include failed attempts and how/why they were unsuccessful, in addition to their successful approaches and attempts. The final report is limited to 8 pages including references and appendices, following the same template as the qualification report. In addition to the final reports, each team should prepare a PowerPoint presentation (up to 10 slides) and a short video (up to 10 minutes) demonstrating their work, to be presented on the day of the live finals at CSAW events. Additional details about deliverables of the final phase are available here.
We stress that final reports must be submitted in PDF format and that they MUST NOT be published or otherwise made publicly available before announcement of ALL winners in ALL global CSAW ESC regions/time zones (i.e., after 10 November 2020).
Each region has different prize policies for the Final Round competition. Please visit https://csaw.io for more details.
Each CSAW region will announce separate winners for the first, second and third place.
All ESC participants in all regions are subject to the NYU Tandon School of Engineering student code of conduct. Any act of academic dishonesty, including but not limited to plagiarism, cheating, fabrication, unauthorized collaboration across different teams, work duplication, will not be tolerated and the offenders will be automatically disqualified from the competition.
Teams can contact their regional organizers at the following email address: [email protected]. To properly route each message and avoid delays in the response, each message must prepend the tag [US-Canada], [Europe], [MENA], or [India] in the subject line, depending on the region of the participating team.
In the event that ESC20 contestants find critical, previously undisclosed vulnerabilities during the competition's final phase, we ask that they contact CSAW ESC20 organizers so we can assist and jointly coordinate responsible disclosure procedures, if any such procedures are deemed necessary.