Today was finally the day. 22 years in the making and I was finally going to be a DefCon attendee. I woke up around 0630 and took care of my biological requirements, got dressed, and laid back down in the bed, fully clothed, and ready to surprise xRichless. I must have been an unwelcome surprise as he rolled over and winced his eyes against the light only to see me leap violently from the covers fully dressed while shouting, “Good morning StarShine! The Earth says, ‘Hello!’” He told the Earth a few choice words of his own before rolling back over.
After dragging him from the bed, we headed down the stairs and over to the convention center where we were greeted by Goons yelling at everyone, in every possible direction. I can’t imagine what was supposed to be happening, but what was happening, is that 10k plus con goers were being directed to stand in taped off segments on the floor while being encouraged by Goons to “pack in tight” and “share malware” with one-another.
By happenstance, I had ended up in the correct line (there was only one, line and by nature, correct one). Which thankfully led to the villages. Entering the villages for the first time is a breathtaking experience. There are people and CTFs and badges and lights and sounds and screens and it was everything, everywhere, all at once. And it was amazing.
I took a quick walk to the IOT village, and ended up in my first session where Simone Bossi from Nozomi Networks was running “Raiders of the Lost Firmware”; an IOT CTF focusing on retrieving firmware images for IOT devices, then working through them to determine vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, this CTF required a laptop, something I’d been encouraged not to bring.
| Author’s Note, definitely grab a small form factor, long battery life laptop and bring it with you to Defcon loaded with your favorite flavor of Linux. Every CTF and exceptionally cool thing I wanted to do (outside the Physical Security village) required a laptop of some sort.
Realizing I wasn’t going to make it far without the laptop, I downloaded all the CTF files and walkthroughs to my phone and toddled on around the corner. When what to my wondering eyes did appear but a GE washing machine and 12 tiny rei…er.., well there was a washer anyway. The GE people had a Burpsuite CTF set up that you could run against their washing machines and their PSIRT team were there and ready to respond to any issues.
Heading on, I hit up Michael Cardwell of Idaho National Laboratory’s talk on OT Neworks. He talked a lot more about snakes than I would have thought, but he introduced a cool tool for working on OT networks, his own Malcolm.fyi. I’m a big fan of mental models, so I was excited to see him introduce the idea of forming, testing, and re-forming hypothesis for threat hunting in any environment instead of just approaching the network to “Find Bad”. Overall good info.
Another interesting note about this years Con is the use of QuietEvents headsets for a lot of the talks. This allowed them to pack in a ton of Creator talks on the smaller stages, with nearly no audio footprint. Instead, con goers walk up to an area, receive a pair of headphones on a specific channel, and can watch the miked-up on stage presenters with little issue. Greatly preferred to having 6-8 presentations all going on simultaneously and conflictingly.
After this talk, I decided to go hit up the SAO (s*** add ons) Badge area where I ended up with a Reali7y Overrun badge. This SAO had a risc-v microcontroller IC driving 6 addressable LEDs and a couple of momentary switches. This is still a mystery to us. It appears that while the traces for the switches go to the microcontroller, they don’t appear to do anything. We’ll keep you updated if that changes.
Then, after a while I ran back into xRichless who’d been having a blast in the Physical Hacking Village. (Did you know you could unlock the wheels of a shopping cart with a tone from your cell phone? More Info. I handed off one of the Reali7y Overrun SAO’s to him and we took off to find a solder station. Once there, a Goon gave us some helpful soldering tips and another SAO, this one from rm cyber. It’s a cool wizard hat with a long beard and three LEDs shifting through red, yellow, and green. Still haven’t figured out what kind of LEDs they are as there’s only a rectifier diode and a few resistors on the PCB. (Later in the evening, we decided to sit down and practice drawing our electrical diagrams. It was a fun puzzle to figure out the path between LEDs, resistors, diodes, and switches.)
xRichless decided to head from here to the Lock Picking Village for some intro lock picking instruction (He’s a natural!) and I likely won’t be able to drag him out tomorrow.
While he did this, I hit up Viande_Morte and headed to the merch area. I know why DefCon is so cheap to get into now, everyone is saving their money for the merch area. I could have spent $10k easily in this place. All the big names were there and some I’ve never heard of. Shout out to Hacker Warehouse and their amazing staff for getting VM and I quickly through line. Goodies for the day included a new T-Deck Pro, more SAO pins, a KeyPort multi-tool complete with a pen, titanium tweezers, a little USB-c jump drive (DC branded of course) and an NFC tag. (xR had us pick him up a set of lock picks, of course).
After all the excitement, VM was happy to head back to the room and get a little down time before dinner. xR and I weren’t quite ready though, so we headed off to a great talk by Andrew Ohustad N3OCQ entitled “Ham Radio ISN’T Magic” which poked fun at preppers and new radio users who want to “reliably talk to my family 500 miles away for $30.” Andrew, a systems architect by trade, did a great job laying out the idea of a communication system for SHTF comms, relying on systems that are resilient (Meshtastic), asynchronous (JS8call), far-reaching (HF), etc… And having communicated and practiced Communications Plans that include 3-3-3 rules, and PACE plans.
| Author’s Note: A 3-3-3 plan consists of attempting to contact each other every 3 hours, for 3 minutes, via 3 Frequencies. And using PACE, Primary, Alternate, Contingent, and Emergency communications strategies.
From here, we headed down to the soldering tables again, I in search of the infamous Marta Jade who was soldering with a microscope and a large screen hooked to her camera and xR looking for an open solder station to build out his wizard hat. After a while of watching Marta work on someone else’s badge (Mine is broken as well, a bad trace or a bad LED, I’m hoping to find out tomorrow), I discovered I was not in the correct end of the line and was standing at the front, not the back. (There are an unnecessary number of unmanaged lines at this con, all which seem to result in someone getting yelled at; though in this case, I just calmly tucked tail and went to join xR at a soldering station.)
Having accidentally soldered my hand, and my project to my hand on several occasions, the newer solder folks began to ask me questions that I was woefully unqualified to answer, like “Which way does this transistor go?” and “Why didn’t my dad come back with milk?” Therapy aside, I made some educated guesses and we all ended up with functioning SAO badges to show off as our own little Con swag.
(I don’t have the video available to push to the server, but someone had an SAO that was a TV screen and cycled through HD gifs of vintage television shows. I had to stop and ask to take a look as the guys badge was playing Scooby-Doo, then He-man’s rendition of 3 Non Blondes. Man, people here are creative.)
After a half hour of soldering and hours of walking con floors, we were wiped. And VM wanted to grab dinner back at the hotel. A quick review of restaurants and Martha Stewart’s Bedford was chosen. I ended up with an entire Clams Mariniere as VM and xR informed me after ordering, they didn’t eat mollusks. Luckily VM ordered some fancy breads to the table, and dinner was quick behind.
The evening finished out with xR deciding he’d like a Chocolate Cake slice. Only, he missed the part before dinner where the waitress mentioned it was the largest dessert. This cake came out every bit of 8"s high and had thick layers of a fudge-y chocolate ganache between each layer. It was divine.
Now, we should be sleeping. But, who can sleep with so many activities around?!