While in Vancouver, Canada for CanSecWest we had a chance to catch up with [Marc]. He showed off a very simple Denial-of-Service attack that works for most commercial RFID reader systems. He worked out this physical DoS with [Adam Laurie], whose RFID work we featured last year.
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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.
Upcoming Convention Roundup
Lots of con news is coming in these days so lets do a quick roundup of upcoming events:
REcon
June 13-15, 2008
Montreal, Canada
REcon has started posting information about their training sessions such as the Advanced Reverse Engineering session with Nicolas Brulez.
The Last HOPE
July 18-20, 2008
New York City
The Last HOPE just announced its speaker list. It includes the infamous Kevin Mitnick, Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage, and author Steven Levy to name a few.
DEFCON 16
August 8-10, 2008
Las Vegas
The DEFCON team also released the first batch of speakers for this year’s convention. Qualification starts tonight at 10PM EST for the capture the flag (CTF) contest so be sure to get registered. Check the txt for more information. We recently talked about the beverage cooling contraption contest, but you can find many other contests on the forums.
Beverage Cooling Contraption Contest
Let’s face it: no one likes warm beer. In the arid August air of Las Vegas, though, it’s difficult to get anything else. To combat this problem, Deviant has hosted a competition the last three years at Defcon called the Beverage Cooling Contraption Contest, or BCCC. We’re not talking about something as simple as a Coleman cooler or even a peltier cooler: the devices entered in this contest have to be able to take a beer from hot to cool and your glass within minutes.
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]
Maker Faire 2008: Schwag
As our final Maker Faire post, we thought we’d talk about some of the curious items that were handed us during the event.
While checking out Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories‘ latest generation CandyFab were given their AVR business card breakout board.
[Garrett] gave us a handful of ShiftBrites to play with in a future project.
We donated to the EFF, as we’re wont to do, and received a super bright blue flashlight for spotting the yellow tracking dots on color laser printouts. If you’re not familiar with this topic, you should check out bunnie’s blue light scanner.
Our final stop was at ifixit to pick up a free set of spatulas (spudgers?) for popping open iPods. All around a decent haul.
Maker Faire 2008: Puzzlemation
[John Peterson] showed us his Puzzlemation, animated tile puzzle at Maker Faire. It was originally designed for the Microchip 16-bit Embedded Control Design Contest. The puzzle is made from multiple modules each with an 8×8 LED grid. The tiles are battery powered and each one has PIC24FJ64GA004 microcontroller. They sit on a tray with flat copper strips as a serial bus. The tray controller broadcasts the animation to the tiles. Each tile waits for its unique identifier and saves that portion of the animation. The tiles don’t actually know what order they’re in so once the animation is in motion you can figure out their proper order; rearranging them so the animation is correct. We’ve got a video of it in action after the break.
