“Attacking cloud systems using passed-through PCIe devices,” a project funded through the 2025 Red Hat Collaboratory Research Incubation Award, earned second place at the inaugural hardware hacking competition at the IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST). The team of researchers, which included Red Hat researcher Bandan Das, along with Boston University’s Chathura Rajapasha (BU PhD candidate of Electrical and Computer Engineering) and ECE Professors Manuel Egele and Ajay Joshi, and IBM researchers Sandhya Koteshwara, Apoorve Mohan, and Hubertus Franke, demonstrated how they exposed a critical vulnerability in a common method cloud providers use to share hardware resources across multiple users. The team believes that this attack demonstration will shed light on an often overlooked aspect of hardware security, highlighting vulnerabilities that deserve greater scrutiny.
Read the full story on the Hariri Institute website: BU-led Team Takes Second Place at IEEE HOST 2025 Hardware Hacking Competition.
