25C3: Cheap Swarm Robotics

December 30, 2008 by Eliot 5 Comments

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The Formica project was our favorite presentation at 25C3. The goal is to build open source swarm robots as cheaply as possible. The team ended up building 25 robots in an assembly line fashion. With enough lead time, the price could get as low as £15 each. Each bot has two direct drive cellphone vibration motors with tiny neoprene wheels. They’re controlled by an MSP430 microcontroller. The only really specialized chip is a charge controller so the bots can charge without any intervention. They have copper skis on the front that touch the ground plane plus antennas to contact Vcc. On top of the bot are three IR detectors for both navigation and for transferring firmware updates between bots. A reflective sensor is on the underside for detecting “food”. It looks like a great design and any easy way for anyone to start researching swarm robotics.

25C3: Hackers Completely Break SSL Using 200 PS3s

December 30, 2008 by Eliot 78 Comments

A team of security researchers and academics has broken a core piece of internet technology. They made their work public at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin today. The team was able to create a rogue certificate authority and use it to issue valid SSL certificates for any site they want. The user would have no indication that their HTTPS connection was being monitored/modified.

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Card Shuffling Machine Failure

December 30, 2008 by Eliot 19 Comments

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Breaking from his usually routine of winning at everything, [Glacial Wanderer] has posted one of his projects that didn’t actually work. It’s a Rube Goldberg style card shuffling machine. He wanted something that was visually interesting while still randomizing the cards. A blower would be mounted to the top to mix the cards similar to a lottery ball machine. The cards would then drop into a chute that would make sure all of the cards were oriented correctly before being presented to the user. After building the first prototype, several problems were apparent. The first of which was the fan not being strong enough. His interest was waning and it looked like the time he’d have to invest in fixes was growing quickly, so he decided to cut his loses. He still posted about the prototype in hopes that it could help someone else exploring this sort of machine. A video of the mechanism can be found below.

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25C3: CTF Dominated By Iphone-dev Team, HackMii

December 30, 2008 by Eliot 4 Comments

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While we had been excited about 25C3’s CTF competition, we couldn’t even venture a guess as to who would win. It seems the iphone-dev team weren’t satisfied to just give an amazing talk. They teamed up with the Wii hackers from HackMii to win the competition. You can see their progress during the eight hour competition above in red. It’s impressive to see hardware hackers jumping over to network security AND completely killing at it.

25C3: Hacking The IPhone

December 28, 2008 by Eliot 13 Comments

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=713763707060529304]

As promised in their yellowsnow demo, [pytey], [MuscleNerd], and [planetbeing] from the iphone-dev team presented at 25C3 on their work Hacking the iPhone. The team originally formed in 2007 and this is the most comprehensive presentation on how the iPhone was compromised to date. You can find the full talk embedded above.

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25C3: Power Line Communication

December 28, 2008 by Eliot 13 Comments

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[Florian] and [Xavier Carcelle] started the day at 25C3 by covering power line communication. PLC technology is not widespread in the US, but has gained popularity in countries like France where it’s included in set-top boxes. PLC lets you create a local network using the AC wires in your wall. The team started exploring PLC because despite being newer technology, it had a few principles that made it similar to old networks. There’s no segmentation in the wiring, which means it behaves like a layer 2 hub. You get to see all of the traffic unlike a switched network. Most power meters don’t filter out the signal, so it’s possible that you might see your next-door neighbor’s traffic on your line. [Florian] reports having seen all the traffic in a six-story building just by plugging in. The wiring also acts as a large antenna so you could employ tempest attacks.

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25C3: State Of The Art Wearable Computing

December 28, 2008 by Eliot 7 Comments

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[Kai Kunze] from the Embedded Systems Lab at Passau came to 25C3 to talk about Cyborgs and Gargoyles: State of the Art in Wearable Computing. There have been a lot of homebrew wearable computing solutions, but [Kai] covered specifically projects that could see everyday use in the real world.

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