We may have a winner for the $20,000 Raspberry Pi and Hextree RP2350 Hacking Challenge, but we won't officially find out who the winner is until January 14. Engineer Aedan Cullen went public with his Hacking the RP2350 presentation at the recent 38th Chaos Communication Congress (38C3), and there is a GitHub repo now published to accompany the video here. Cullen studied the RP2350 in detail before going for a voltage injection glitch attack on pin 53 of the RP2350 chip, which managed to turn on the 'permanently disabled' RISC-V cores and their debug access port, enabling him to read the secret.
Raspberry Pi introduced the RP2350 via the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 as a successor to the RP2040 – with added security features to appeal to commercial and industrial customers. To publicize the new microcontroller it teamed up with Hextree to devise the RP2350 Hacking Challenge, announced at DEF CON in August. This challenge concluded on 31 Dec 2024, but we must wait until January 14 for the official winner announcement. Cullen made his presentation at 38C3 on Dec 27 and also shared a GitHub repo with an outline of his hacking process and Python code. However, we don't know if Cullen is the winner, so this may not be the $20K winning hack method.
