If you’re at Defcon, today is the last day to get a free t-shirt in person. After today they’re going to be much harder to come by: i.e. send us your exclusive project. So track us down and ask for a shirt. I shouldn’t be too hard to find. I mean seriously, bright freakin’ green
Team PAD has done it again. Running out of highway last year they were only able to get 55.1 miles. This year they made it all the way into Utah to do their record breaking shot. Congratulations guys!
If anybody is looking for Primestar or DirectTV dishes to do long links with, I’ve gotten two of them using freecycle.
There were two possible categories: cooling a sealed beer and cooling a poured beer. Fastest time to get to 38 degreesF wins, if you kept it under $100. The beer of choice was Tecate at a toasty 90 degreesF surface temp. To kill time while the trials were being conducted the audience answered beer trivia questions and won prizes (thanks for the cherry bomb guys!). Unfortunately I didn’t get to see this competition to it’s completion, but here’s a photo of the Cincinnati Drinking Team’s entry.
Steganography is the art of hiding things in plain sight. When done correctly an observer shouldn’t be able to tell that there is a hidden message as opposed to cryptography where it is obvious that something is hidden. To do this using text you usually need a large piece of source material; say all of the works of Shakespeare. Since these works are known to most people steg can usually be broken using statistical analysis.
Christian’s solution is to use machine translated (MT) texts as the source material. It is hard to make a computer generate consistant semantically and rhetorically correct texts that mimic the original is very difficult. The technique presented here uses MT texts because translation errors are expected and common.
Continue reading “Defcon Day 1 – Lost In Translation – Christian Grothoff”
Well, it’s my turn to roll into town. I got to my friend’s apartment at midnight and I am ready for dead bed. Vince is out with former editor Jason Striegel right now and isn’t sure when the night will end. Well I’ll see you guys tomorrow and I am sure we’ll post a pic to make finding us a little easier.
Well the two big stories this week are the CISCO router problem and Philip “PGP” Zimmerman’s new project. Originally unveiled at Black Hat earlier this week his new crypted VOIP looks really interesting. Well it would have looked interesting if the demo had worked; eventually his partner just called on a cellphone. The goal is to return the “security” of land lines to the world of VOIP.
The app is based on the shtoom project (open source VOIP written in Python) and the crypto is strapped ontop. A nice feature of the protocol is hashing part of the previous conversation’s key into the current conversation. If you and the other person read the hash aloud and they match it means that this conversation and every previous one has been fully secure.
He’s shopping the project around to venture capital right now to make a commercial product written in C. The source will still be free though.
Most people have left by now, but they were able to get the demo going. It is funny to hear a secure call blasted over loud speakers. He’s got a switch in the software to switch off the packet decryption so you can hear what the wiretap hears
Defcon isn’t the only hacker gathering starting up right now. If you are at What The Hack in the Netherlands you might catch a glimpse of this project. It’s a wardriving box based on the WRAP. The platform is similar to the Soekris boards and the site actually describes both. It isn’t a complete how to, but you’ll have a good idea of what’s in store for you if you want to attempt this.
[thanks ian]
