We’ve printed [John Keppel]’s winning t-shirt design. They’ll be available for purchase in the vendor area at Defcon. If you’re at the con, pick one up because we don’t have any plans yet to distribute them online. We will have a small number of women’s tank tops as well. See you there!
Every year, the Defcon badge takes a technological step forward. The details are starting to emerge for this years hardware lineup. Last years badge, pictured above, had LED status indicators and an IR transceiver. There’s no telling what this years badge will do, but we do know it has a new processor. They have chosen the Freescale MC56F8006 to build everything around this year. We think it would be cool to see some RFID, maybe a heat map of the traffic in the facility. Maybe some distributed computing would be cool. What could we do with an embedded camera? We eagerly await more details.
Notorious hacker conference Defcon has just published their Call for Papers. The 17th annual event will happen July 30th through August 2nd. Most of the announcement is the same boilerplate they’ve included for the past two years. Like last year, they’re not defining the specific speaking track themes and will come up with them based on submissions. New for this year is a half-day of workshops on the Thursday before Defcon for anyone that’s showing up early. This pre-con event is targeted at newbies. It certainly sounds like an interesting way to ease into Defcon instead of the usual delays and fire marshals. We’ve been attending every year since 2005 and love seeing new things. You should definitely consider presenting this year (we want to see more hardware!).
Kenshoto, organizer of the official Defcon Capture the Flag contest for the last four years, has stepped down from the position, and thus Defcon is looking for a new organizer for the event. If you’re highly competent, and maybe a little crazy, this might be your chance to step in and run one of the most well-known and prestigious hacking contests in the world. Please understand that the staff is looking for someone who wants to take ownership of the contest and make something new, unique, and challenging, and that Kenshoto has left extremely huge shoes to fill. Merely offering to replicate the existing contest and keep things mostly unchanged isn’t going to cut it.
If you’re up to the challenge, check out Dark Tangent’s post on the Defcon forums (which, for some odd reason, sounds strikingly like his 2005 post calling for a CTF organizer), where he comprehensively lays out what the staff is looking for in a new event organizer. If it jives well with you, get in touch with the Defcon staff, and maybe we’ll be covering your contest later this year.
Zero Day posted a list of tools and applications that were released at Defcon 16. The applications run the gamut, from Beholder, an open source wireless IDS tool, to CollabREate, a reverse-engineering plugin that allows multiple people to share a single project. The list covers a lot of ground, and there’s a lot for hackers to play around with and explore. It’s nice to see someone bothering to maintain a list since the majority of conference tools just get lost in the shuffle and are never seen again.
One of the more novel talks we saw at Defcon was [Zac Franken] presenting on access control systems. He covered several different types, but the real fun was his live demo of bypassing a hand geometry scanners like the one pictured above. With the help of two assistants, 4 pounds of chromatic dental alginate, and 5 liters of water, he made a mold of his hand. The box he placed his hand in had markings to show where the pegs on the scanner are located. After 2 minutes he could remove his hand from the cavity. They then filled the mold with vinylpolysiloxane, making sure to remove all bubbles. 20 minutes later the hand was solid and passed the scanner’s test. This may not be a completely practical attack, but it does defeat the overall idea of biometrics; biometrics are built on the assumption that every person is unique and can’t have their features reproduced.
[Zac] also showed an interesting magnetic card spoofer that emulated all three tracks using coils of magnet wire. We hope to see more about that in the future.
[photo: morgan.davis]
Wired’s Threat Level takes us on a photo tour of the Defcon Network Operations Center, giving a unique behind-the-scenes perspective of one of the largest computer security conventions. The Defcon Network Operations Center is run by a volunteer group named the “Goons”. They keep operations running smoothly and securely with both high and low-tech resources, like a Cisco fiber switch and an armed guard, to protect the router and firewall.
