Dust off your rainbow tables and grab a  burner laptop, this Thursday, April 11,  Cyphercon 4.0 roars into Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It’s a security conference with all that entails, but there is a bit of emphasis on crypto. A founding principle of Cyphercon is to support a  “free and open discussion on strong cryptography”.

You’ll find 10 community submitted puzzles to get warmed up for solving clever challenges. There’s a wireless capture-the-flag challenge to boost your wireless sniffing/spoofing skills using simple tools like Raspberry Pi and the YARD stick One (which we just saw doing keyless entry attacks). As you’d expect, a wide range of talks from well know security professionals has been planned.

There’s a few talks I’m particularly interested in seeing. Vi Grey’s talk on NES ROM polyglots is a can’t miss for me even though I’ve I’ve read about his work at length. Oh, and you know all those 23andMe DNA tests? Michelle Meas has a talk about what happens when genome databases from companies like that get breached. Eric Escobar isn’t just running the wireless CTF, but giving a talk along with Matt Orme on hardware for remote wireless pen testing. And I’m a sucker for talks from legal experts so Amit Elazari Bar On’s presentation on legal issue with bug bounty programs is very high on my list.

But these are just the things that are formally planned at the conference. I missed out on last year’s Cyphercon and heard the badge hacking challenges were on-point. I’m looking forward to seeing what they can come up with this time around! I’ll report back on what I encounter… I’m hoping to run into you there!