Hackaday Is Going To The 36th Chaos Communication Congress

December 20, 2019 by Elliot Williams 8 Comments

It’s that time of year again here in Germany. The mulled wine flows all night long at the Christmas markets, the Krampus runs wild in the streets, and hackers are perched frantically behind their keyboards and soldering irons, trying to get their last minute projects “finished” for the 36th annual Chaos Communication Congress (36C3) in Leipzig.

We’ll have an assembly for all fans and friends of the Jolly Wrencher, so if you’re coming to Congress, you can come join us or at least stop by and say hi. [Elliot] and [Sven] and a number of Hackaday.io luminaries will be on hand. (Ask us about secret stickers and an as-yet unannounced upcoming Hackaday conference.)

Even if you’re not able to make it, you should keep your eyes on Hackaday from the 27th to the 30th, because we’ll be reporting on the best of Congress. But you don’t have to take our word for it: the Chaos Computer Club makes all of the talks available on livestream during the event, many with simultaneous translation, and final edited versions often appearing just a few hours afterwards.

We’ve looked through the schedule, and it’s going to be a hum-dinger! Gather ’round the glowing box with your friends at your own local hackerspace, or call in sick from work and make yourself some popcorn. This is must-see nerd TV.

Whether you’ve been naughty or nice, swing by our assembly if you’re going to be in Leipzig for the last few days of 2019. See you there!

Kerry Scharfglass Secures Your IoT Things

December 20, 2019 by Elliot Williams 6 Comments

We’ve all seen the IoT device security trainwrecks: those gadgets that fail so spectacularly that the comment section lights up with calls of “were they even thinking about the most basic security?” No, they probably weren’t. Are you?

Hackaday Contributor and all around good guy Kerry Scharfglass thinks about basic security for a living, and his talk is pitched at the newcomer to device security. (Embedded below.) Of course “security” isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition; you need to think about what threats you’re worried about, which you can ignore, and defend against what matters. But if you’ve never worked through such an exercise, you’re in for a treat here. You need to think like a maker, think like a breaker, and surprisingly, think like an accountant in defining what constitutes acceptable risks. Continue reading “Kerry Scharfglass Secures Your IoT Things” →

David Williams Is “FPGA-Curious”

December 6, 2019 by Elliot Williams 17 Comments

If you hadn’t noticed, we had a bit of an FPGA theme running at this year’s Superconference. Why? Because the open-source FPGA toolchain is ripening, and because many of the problems that hackers (and academics) are tackling these days have become complex enough to warrant using them. A case in point: David Williams is a university professor who just wanted to build a quadruped robotics project. Each leg has a complex set of motors, motor drivers, sensors, and other feedback mechanisms. Centralizing all of this data put real strains on the robot’s network, and with so many devices the microcontrollers were running out of GPIOs. This lead him to become, in his words, “FPGA-curious”.

If you’re looking for a gentle introduction to the state of the art in open-source FPGAs, this is your talk. David covers everything, from a bird’s eye view of hardware description languages, through the entire Yosys-based open-source toolchain, and even through to embedding soft-CPUs into the FPGA fabric. And that’s just the first 18 minutes. (Slides for your enjoyment, and you can watch the talk embedded below the break.)
Continue reading “David Williams Is “FPGA-Curious”” →

Hackaday Podcast 044: Supercon 2019 Special

November 22, 2019 by Elliot Williams 5 Comments

Half of the Hackaday writing staff was at the 2019 Hackaday Supercon this weekend, and our own Kerry Scharfglass took the opportunity to interview everyone. Meanwhile, Elliot wandered around the soldering irons just about two hours before the Badge Hacking Ceremony, collecting stories of projects that worked, and those that didn’t.

Put the two together, and you’ve got an audio collage that gives you a peek into at least one facet of Supercon life, and gives you a chance to put voices to the words you read here every day!

We’ll be back to our normal programming next week.

Tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast 044: Supercon 2019 Special” →

Supercon Keynote: Dr. Megan Wachs On RISC-V

November 6, 2019 by Elliot Williams 28 Comments

Hackaday has open-source running deep in our veins — and that goes for hardware as well as software. After all, it’s great to run open-source software, but if it’s running on black-box hardware, the system is only half open. While software has benefited mightily from all of the advantages of community development, the hardware world has been only recently catching up. And so we’ve been following the RISC-V open-source CPU development with our full attention.

Our keynote speaker for the 2019 Hackaday Superconference is Dr. Megan Wachs, the VP of Engineering at SiFive, the company founded by the creators of the RISC-V instruction-set architecture (ISA). She has also chaired the RISC-V Foundation Debug Task Group, so it’s safe to say that she knows RISC-V inside and out. If there’s one talk we’d like to hear on the past, present, and future of the architecture, this is it.

The RISC-V isn’t a particular chip, but rather it’s a design for how a CPU works, and a standard for the lowest-level language that the machine speaks. In contrast to proprietary CPUs, RISC-V CPUs from disparate vendors can all use the same software tools, unifying and opening their development. Moreover, open hardware implementations for the silicon itself mean that new players can enter the space more easily, bring their unique ideas to life faster, and we’ll all benefit. We can all work together.

It’s no coincidence that this year’s Supercon badge has two RISC-V cores running in its FPGA fabric. When we went shopping around for an open CPU core design, we had a few complete RISC-V systems to pick from, full compiler and development toolchains to write code for them, and of course, implementations in Verilog ready to flash into the FPGA. The rich, open ecosystem around RISC-V made it a no-brainer for us, just as it does for companies making neural-network peripherals or even commodity microcontrollers. You’ll be seeing a lot more RISC-V systems in the near future, on your workbench and in your pocket.

We’re tremendously excited to hear more about the project from the inside, and absolutely looking forward to Megan’s keynote speech!

The Hackaday Superconference is completely sold out, but that doesn’t mean that you have to miss out. We’ll be live-streaming the keynote and all other talks on the Supercon main stage, so subscribe our YouTube channel and you won’t miss a thing.

Warwalking For Radiation

September 10, 2019 by Elliot Williams 24 Comments

Can’t find a recently updated survey of radioactivity in your neighborhood? Try [Hunter Long]’s DIY scintillation counter warwalking rig. (Video also embedded below.) What looks like a paint can with a BNC cable leading to an unassuming grey box is actually a complete kit for radiation surveying.

Inside the metal paint can is a scintillation counter, which works by attaching something that produces light when struck by ionizing radiation on the end of a photomultiplier tube, to make even the faintest hits “visible”. And the BNC cable leads to a Raspberry Pi, touch screen, GPS, and the high-voltage converters needed to make the photomultiplier do its thing.

The result is a sensitive radiation detector that logs GPS coordinates and counts per second as [Hunter] takes it out for a stroll. Spoilers: he discovers that some local blacktop is a little bit radioactive, and even finds a real “hot spot”. Who knows what else is out there? With a rig like this, making a radiation map of your local environment is a literal walk in the park.

[Hunter] got his inspiration for the paint-can detector from this old build by [David Prutchi], which used a civil-defense Geiger counter as its source of high voltage. If you don’t have a CD Geiger detector lying around, [Alex Lungu]’s entry into the Hackaday Prize builds a scintillation detector from scratch.
Continue reading “Warwalking For Radiation” →

ESP8266 And ESP32 WiFi Hacked!

September 5, 2019 by Elliot Williams 48 Comments

[Matheus Garbelini] just came out with three (3!) different WiFi attacks on the popular ESP32/8266 family of chips. He notified Espressif first (thanks!) and they’ve patched around most of the vulnerabilities already, but if you’re running software on any of these chips that’s in a critical environment, you’d better push up new firmware pretty quick.

The first flaw is the simplest, and only effects ESP8266s. While connecting to an access point, the access point sends the ESP8266 an “AKM suite count” field that contains the number of authentication methods that are available for the connection. Because the ESP doesn’t do bounds-checking on this value, a malicious fake access point can send a large number here, probably overflowing a buffer, but definitely crashing the ESP. If you can send an ESP8266 a bogus beacon frame or probe response, you can crash it.

What’s most fun about the beacon frame crasher is that it can be implemented on an ESP8266 as well. Crash-ception! This takes advantage of the ESP’s packet injection mode, which we’ve covered before.

The second and third vulnerabilities exploit bugs in the way the ESP libraries handle the extensible authentication protocol (EAP) which is mostly used in enterprise and higher-security environments. One hack makes the ESP32 or ESP8266 on the EAP-enabled network crash, but the other hack allows for a complete hijacking of the encrypted session.

These EAP hacks are more troubling, and not just because session hijacking is more dangerous than a crash-DOS scenario. The ESP32 codebase has already been patched against them, but the older ESP8266 SDK has not yet. So as of now, if you’re running an ESP8266 on EAP, you’re vulnerable. We have no idea how many ESP8266 devices are out there in EAP networks, but we’d really like to see Espressif patch up this hole anyway.

[Matheus] points out the irony that if you’re using WPA2, you’re actually safer than if you’re unpatched and using the nominally more secure EAP. He also wrote us that if you’re stuck with a bunch of ESP8266s in an EAP environment, you should at least encrypt and sign your data to prevent eavesdropping and/or replay attacks.

Again, because [Matheus] informed Espressif first, most of the bugs are already fixed. It’s even percolated downstream into the Arduino-for-ESP, where it’s just been worked into the latest release a few hours ago. Time for an update. But those crusty old NodeMCU builds that we’ve got running everything in our house? Time for a full recompile.

We’ve always wondered when we’d see the first ESP8266 attacks in the wild, and that day has finally come. Thanks, [Matheus]!