[Joe Grand] is designing the Defcon badges for the third year in a row. Just like the previous years, they’ll be hosting a badge hacking contest. This time around though, they’re going to start leaking clues in advance. Earlier contests were often frustrating because of the specialized equipment needed to talk to the microcontroller. Hopefully this year it will be a lot more accesible. The specs for the badge have not been released yet, but after last year’s 95 LED scrolling marque, we can’t wait to see what this year will bring. [Joe] has posted info on the previous two badge designs and resulting contests.
DefconBots Sentry Gun Competition
DefconBots is returning again this year with their shooting gallery robot competition for Defcon 16. They’ve decided to leave the rules unchanged from last year. It’s a head to head competition between fully autonomous guns. The first gun to shoot all the targets on their side of the board wins. The rules aren’t very strict on design; as long as you use nonlethal nonmessy amunition and include a safety switch you’re pretty much good to go. The DefconBots site has a reference design to put you on the fast track to competing. Defcon 16 is August 8-10, 2008 in Las Vegas.
Related: [Aaron Rasmussen]’s sentry gun we covered back in 2005
[photo: Bre Pettis]
DefCon CTF Qualifier Results
Kenshoto held qualifiers for the DefCon‘s Capture the Flag competition last weekend. The top seven finishers: Routards, Pandas with Gambas, Guard@MyLan0, Shellphish, Taekwon-V, WOWHACKER, PLUS, and last year’s winners, 1@stPlace, will be invited to participate in the final this August in Las Vegas.
The qualification started Friday night at 10PM EDT with an email (Subject: M0rt4g3 y0ur /14gr4 up 2 3 1nch3$) being sent to all 451 registered teams. Connecting to the game server displayed a Jeopardy style score board. The five available categories were Binary Leetness, Forensics, Real World, Potent Pwnables, and Trivia, with point values from 100 to 500. Only one question was opened to start. The first team to answer that was allowed to select the next question to open and then any team could try to answer it. Participants were warned about the difficulty of the 500 level questions and the entire Real World category. At the end of everything, four questions still remained locked at the end.
If you’re interested in what type of questions the contest had, check out the write up on NOPSR.US, which has all the files and solutions. Non-qualifiers can still participate in DC949’s OpenCTF.
DefCon CTF 2008 Qualifier
Kenshoto is back again to run the Capture the Flag competition at DefCon. CTF is a multiteam competition featuring creative attack and defense of servers and lasts the entirety of DefCon. Unreleased exploits are often seen during the competition. As in previous years, Kenshoto will be narrowing the field with a qualification round. Quals will start the evening of May 30th and run for 48 hours. NOPS-R-US has a solution guide for the previous two years so you can get some idea of what you’re getting yourself into. They’ve even got a couple write ups for last year’s final. The competition should prove entertaining even if you don’t make the final cut.
[via Midnight Research Lab]
Defcon 15: Wrap-up
Our friend [Alex] was a little late getting to our t-shirt free-for-all today, but I just found out why: He was writing a great wrap-up of the many Defcon talks he attended. It’s well worth your time and will give you an idea of the broad slice of info that’s covered at the convention. That picture is him repruhzenting for Hack-A-Day in Fast Company magazine.
Update: I’m finally getting caught up on my RSS feeds; check out Richard Bejtlich’s equally good summary of Black Hat: part 1 and part 2.
Defcon 15: Exploiting Authentication Systems
[Zac Franken] gave a good talk on authentication systems. (Card readers, biometric systems, etc). After a good introduction to various access control systems, he demoed an excellent exploit tool. Rather than focus on the access mechanism, he exploited the lack of reader installation security. Most card readers are secured by a plastic cover and a pair of screws. Inside, the reader wires are vulnerable. [Zac] put together the equivalent of a keyboard sniffer for the reader wiring. With this little device in place, he was able to collect access codes and use them to exploit the reader authentication system.
The operation goes like this: Install the sniffer. Let it collect some codes. On return, [Zac] is able to use his own card to become a pseudo authenticated card owner, restrict and allow access to other cards. That’s it. No sneaking up behind people to read their cards, just a few minutes with a screwdriver.
He’s not releasing the design, simply because measures to prevent this type of intercept/control mechanism would be extremely costly.
Defcon 15: Hacking EVDO
[King Tuna]’s Hacking EVDO was a popular talk. Things are really just starting on this front. Now that some of the newer cards have unlocked firmware (probably thanks to the need for sofware update EVDO revisions), It’s now possible to edit the firmware. With the door open, people can start mucking around with ESN’s and we’ll probably see some ESN duplication exploits soon.
