Special Topics: Competitive Embedded System Design and Exploitation

Course Number: 14-722

Department: Information Networking Institute

Location: Pittsburgh

Units: 12

Semester Offered: Spring

Building on experience and expertise in software development, embedded systems, security engineering, and vulnerability analysis, students will participate in a semester-long competition to design a purpose-driven embedded prototype that is able to protect itself and its assets against a wide variety of faults and attacks. The competition is facilitated by MITRE and has a different application scenario and hardware platform each year, and CMU fields a competition team comprising students with a variety of relevant backgrounds. The initial six weeks of the semester are spent designing and building out the software prototype, which is then released to other teams. The remainder of the semester is spent exploring, analyzing, and exploiting the designs of other competitors, in the style of a capture the flag (CTF) activity. Course grading and number of units earned do not depend on the ranking of the CMU team in the MITRE competition but rather on participation and contributions to the team's software design and exploitation activities. Enrollment in this course is subject to instructor approval.

Home department

Information Networking Institute

Background required

No prerequisites

Faculty and instructors who have taught this course in the past

Patrick Tague