Posts from the Cons Category at Hack a Day

Recon 2008 recap

Posted Jul 3rd 2008 8:50PM by Juan Aguilar
Filed under: cons, news

[Tiller Beauchamp] gave a presentation on applied reverse engineering in OS X at this year's REcon, but he also attended many of the other talks and gives his take on the highlights of REcon 2008 in a guest post on the ZDNet blog, Zero Day.

One of the highlights for him was Neohapsis's [Chris Smith] discussing virtual machines implementing code obfuscation. The method uses custom instructions and runtime interpreter, which can help make the task of reverse engineering markedly more difficult if implemented properly.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, [Beauchamp] noted [Gerardo Richarte]'s software reverse engineering tools that decompile and recompile software in iterative portions. This allows the recompiled software to be tested piece by piece. Be sure to read his post and see what you missed.

25th Chaos Communications Congress

Posted Jul 2nd 2008 4:15AM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: cons

The 25th annual Chaos Communications Congress is happening December 27-30th in Berlin, Germany. They've just published their official call for papers. Last year's 24C3 was incredible and we'll take any chance we get to attend an event held by the fine folks in the CCC. We hope to see you there!

[via BoingBoing]

The Last Hope schedule finalized, preregister now

Posted Jun 30th 2008 5:50PM by Juan Aguilar
Filed under: cons

The schedule for this year's The Last Hope conference in New York City has been finalized, and there's still time to preregister. Today is the last chance for overseas attendants to preregister, and the rest of you have until July 6th. A/V volunteers are still needed, so step up if you have the desire and skills.

The three-day conference will feature three tracks of scheduled talks, plus one track for unscheduled talks by registered attendees. You can view the full schedule interactively, in wiki format, or in conventional format. It takes place between July 18th and July 20th; hurry up and snag your tickets now. We're interested in all the talks, but [Chris Seidel]'s talk on biohacking, NYC Resistor's presentation about collaborative hardware hacking, and [Ray]'s demonstration on escaping high security handcuffs have us waiting in rapt anticipation. So who's going? What are you looking forward to? Let us know in the comments.

Defcon 16 schedule finalized

Posted Jun 28th 2008 1:05AM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: cons, news

If you were waiting to finalize you travel plans, now's the time; Defcon has published the final speaking schedule. The conference starts Friday August 8th in Las Vegas, NV and continues through Sunday with four separate speaking tracks. There's quite a few talks we're looking forward to: Silicon guru [Christopher Tarnovsky] from Flylogic will be hosting a breakout session on smartcard security. [Gadi Evron] will talk about the security implications of biological implants in the future. [Thomas Wilhelm] is going to cover building a mobile hacker space and the vehicle related hacks it requires.

Defcon badge hacking contest

Posted Jun 25th 2008 10:20PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: contests, cons

[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.

Hacker conference videos

Posted Jun 25th 2008 9:20PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: cons

Almost every security conference we've attended in the last year has uploaded videos from their speaker tracks. Explore the archives below, and you're bound to find an interesting talk.

[thanks, Dan]
[photo: ario_j]

DefconBots sentry gun competition

Posted Jun 24th 2008 6:30PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: robots hacks, cons

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]

Pwnie awards 2008, nominations open

Posted Jun 24th 2008 5:00AM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: cons

Nominations for the 2008 Pwnie Awards have opened. The annual event, in its second year, is accepting nominations in nine categories ranging from Mass 0wnage to Best Song. The awards will be presented at the Black Hat in Las Vegas in August. Linux.com covered last year's awards ceremony.

[photo: GNUCITIZEN]
[via trailofbits]

The Last HOPE full speaker list released

Posted Jun 19th 2008 6:20PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: cons

The Last HOPE has just released a list of all the schedule talks at the conference. 97 different talks will be divided over three tracks during the course of the three day conference. It looks like a lot of interesting events will be going down. The Cold Boot encryption attack tools will be released. Representatives from Graffiti Research Lab will be showing The Complete First Season and unveiling their One Laser Tag Per Child system. Virgil Griffith from WikiScanner will be mining even deeper into the wretched hive of scum and villainy. Karsten Nohl will present why hardware obfuscation is an impossibility and how they defeated the MiFare crypto. The Last HOPE will be in New York City July 18-20, 2008

LA SIGGRAPH Maker Night

Posted Jun 17th 2008 5:30AM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: cons

We coaxed our friends at Mahalo Daily into coming along with us to LA SIGGRAPH's Maker Night. There were a handful of interesting projects there. [Univac] was showing a circuit bent Teletubby and his CellularRecombomat. [Brett Doar] brought his Bronco Table. Tired of engineers building items that made life easier, he decided to make something that made life more difficult. The table uses a piezo to detect the sound of something being set on top. It then starts twitching and bucking to shake the item free. The motors look like they're salvaged window motors. Finally, we talked to [Mark Frauenfelder] from BoingBoing/Make about how he got into the DIY culture.

Exploit-Me Firefox XSS and SQL scanning addon

Posted Jun 14th 2008 2:40AM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: cons

One of the best tools we saw at LayerOne was the Exploit-Me series presented by [Dan Sinclair]. Security Compass created these tools to help developers easily identify cross site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection vulnerabilities.

Continue reading Exploit-Me Firefox XSS and SQL scanning addon

The Best of 2600

Posted Jun 12th 2008 5:50PM by Juan Aguilar
Filed under: cons, news

2600 editor [Emmanuel Goldstein], has decided to publish The Best of 2600. It features some of the best essays on lockpicking, phone phreaking, social engineering, and other topics that the hacker quarterly had to offer.

Founded in 1984, 2600 was one of the major catalysts that got the modern hacker scene going. They published controversial articles on topics like red boxing and spawned monthly meetings. This firsthand account of the development of hacker culture will be released in July at The Last HOPE in New York.

RFID reader denial of service

Posted Jun 9th 2008 7:20PM by Fabienne Serriere
Filed under: wireless hacks, cons

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.

DefCon CTF qualifier results

Posted Jun 2nd 2008 5:00PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: cons

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

Posted May 30th 2008 8:00PM by Sean Percival
Filed under: cons

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.

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