Riding the wave of success: Security and Forensics Engineering Lab from VCU College of Engineering wins 2025 hacking competition at IEEE international symposium
By Jena Salem
The College of Engineering’s Security and Forensics Engineering (SAFE) Lab researchers showcased their excellence after championing the Hardware Hacking Competition at the 18th Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST) and being selected as a finalist for the Best Paper Award.
Members of the lab group consist of Irfan Ahmed, Ph.D., Engineering Foundation Professor from the Department of Computer Science; Adeen Ayub, assistant professor at James Madison University and Irfan’s former Ph.D. student; Rima Awad, a collaborator from Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and Ph.D. students Muhammad Shaharyar, Nehal Ameen and Muhammad Ahsan. The team entered the Ph.D. dissertation and hardware hacking competition and also submitted several hardware posters, demos and three research papers.
Among these entries included a collaborative paper between the SAFE Lab and a research team led by Aisha Ali-Gombe, an associate professor from Louisiana State University. Titled WaveSleuth: Retrospective PLC Memory for Anomaly Detection in Industrial Control Systems, the initial work on it previously earned the Best Poster Award at the 2023 39th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) in Austin, Texas.
SAFE’s members also presented “Built to Function, Hacked to Fail: Exploiting PLC Benign Design Features for Stealthy Control Logic Attacks,” which details how hackers bypass the traditional intrusion detection systems to attack industrial control logic programs used for controlling traffic lights at the event. The project swept the competition and won first overall, bringing home an astounding victory for the college.
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Categories Computer Science, Graduate Student Stories, Student Stories