CMU hacking team wins unprecedented fourth straight title at MITRE cybersecurity competition

For the fourth consecutive year, Carnegie Mellon’s competitive hacking team, the Plaid Parliament of Pwning (PPP), has taken home the top prize at the MITRE Embedded Capture-the-Flag (eCTF) cybersecurity competition.

CMU’s win marks the first time in the 10-year history of the MITRE eCTF competition that a team has won four consecutive titles.

Over the course of three months, PPP, and 115 other collegiate and high-school teams, worked to design and implement a satellite TV system solution. Each system focused on securing video frame transmission to ensure that only users with the valid subscriptions can see them. The teams aimed to encode and decode satellite TV data streams while protecting against unauthorized access to protected channels.

“While the overall problem scope is somewhat smaller compared to previous years, this is still a realistic scenario that is significantly harder to implement correctly than it might seem at first glance,” said Leonardo Mouta, Master of Robotics in Systems Development (MRSD) student at the CMU Robotics Institute, and PPP team member. “The security of our design hinged on how well we could model an attacker and how they might compromise our assets, which is difficult to emulate.”

PPP’s win came in a landslide, scoring nearly 40,000 more points than the competition’s second-place finisher. CyLab project scientist Maverick Woo, who co-advised the team with Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Siewiorek and Walker Family professor Anthony Rowe and Information Networking Institute (INI) Associate Teaching Professor Patrick Tague, credits the victory to the group’s composition and work ethic.

“Our CMU students put in the hard work. They really spent a lot of time in the lab,” said Woo. “It’s hard work plus talent; you cannot have only one of them to win a competition like this.”

The competition had two phases—design and attack. Each phase offered opportunities to score points by obtaining flags and submitting them to the live eCTF scoreboard.

During the design phase, the teams acted as hackers creating a secure product from a prototype provided by MITRE. In the attack phase, teams had the opportunity to vet each other's respective designs to see if other teams actually implemented the security requirements of the specification, capturing flags when they were able to identify security vulnerabilities.

eCTF competitions are unique from other CTF competitions because they focus on embedded systems security. Students not only defend against traditional cybersecurity attack vectors but also need to consider hardware-based attacks such as side-channel attacks, fault injection attacks, and hardware modification attacks.

“eCTF 2025 provided me with a platform to explore embedded systems and the security surrounding them on a deeper level, introducing me to new hardware attack vectors and challenging me to perform those attacks in real life,” said Rohil Chaudhry, Master of Science in Information Security (MSIS) student and PPP team member. “The scale of the competition also showcased the critical importance of effective time management under pressure, maintaining clear, consistent communication with teammates and learning how to prioritize tasks dynamically based on shifting goals and constraints.”

Funding for the team was made possible by several CyLab partners: Amazon Web Services, AT&T, Cisco, Infineon, Nokia Bell Labs, Rolls-Royce, and Siemens.

 
Members of PPP’s winning team are listed below:

• Om Arora, CSD First-year
• Sky Bailey, ECE Senior
• Taha Biyikli, CSD First-year
• Rohil Chaudhry, INI Master’s Student
• Samuel Dinesh, INI Master’s Student
• Daniel Ha, ECE First-year
• Akhil Harikumar, INI Master’s Student
• Janice He, INI Master’s Student
• Peiyu Lin, ECE Master’s Student
• Harrison Lo, ECE Master’s Student
• Leonardo Mouta, RI Master’s Student
• Matin Sadeghian, CSD First-year
• Carson Swoveland, ECE Senior
• Surya Togaru, INI Master’s Student
• Haonan Yan, INI Master’s Student
  

For media inquires, please contact Michael Cunningham at mocunnin@andrew.cmu.edu