DEF CON 34 Part I: One Bag, One Badge, Too Many Cables

This year will mark the fifth consecutive year that I will be attending DEF CON. I am like a giddy little kid this time of year. I can say with some certainty that DEF CON may be my favorite event every year. There are some smaller hacker and security cons that I attend in and around the Chicago area each year, like THOTCON (now only once every 2 years) and Blue Team Con, but neither can hold a candle to DEF CON. The shear magnitude of the conference, the breadth of disciplines covered, with 25,000+ attendees, make all others pale by comparison. For several reasons I can’t wait to get to this year’s conference. And then there are the cables. I will be packing enough adapters and connectors to communicate with just about every electronic device known to humankind, most of which I will probably carry around all weekend without ever using.

Wander Into Unfamiliar Corners

I treated my first couple of trips to DEF CON somewhat like I treat most conferences. I check the speaking schedule each day, line up which talks I want to see, and wander around the expo floor in between talks. For those who haven’t been, when I say there is breadth of disciplines, I am not exaggerating. Each year there are anywhere between 30 to 40 Villages centered around different security niches. Villages are independent, volunteer-run mini-conferences focused on specific security areas. A few examples are AI Village, Car Hacking Village, Lockpick Village, and Red Team Village. Beyond the Villages there are also hands-on workshops and different competitions like Capture-The-Flag.

Those first few trips I mostly stuck to things that were familiar and related to work, like physical security (access control systems) and wireless security, etc. Though the first year I was there I wandered into the HAM Radio Village. I had a passing interest in HAM Radio but never really looked seriously into it. I enjoyed myself so much at the HAM Radio Village that on the last day of the conference I got my Technician license for amateur radio. The Village hosts licensing exams during the conference. I hadn’t attended that first year thinking I would be a licensed HAM operator when I left.

DEF CON will present many opportunities to find your way into things you may have never thought would interest you. I never knew how to pick locks before, but I do now. Well, I at least have functional knowledge of it. I am barely mediocre on my best day. My point being that you might be surprised where you find yourself at DEF CON. Last year for example, for the first time I entered a competition. I spent an entire day at the Radio Frequency Village in the RF CTF competition they host. A specialized competition focused on wireless signals where participants use Software Defined Radio (SDR) tools and challengectl software to capture, decode, and solve over-the-air signal puzzles. I started the day with a modest goal of simply getting myself on the scoreboard. I did indeed accomplish that goal and even held a spot in the top 20 for a few hours. I had never done anything like it before, and can say it was some of the most fun I ever had at DEF CON. In my four trips so far, I have had a unique experience every time. I made a conscious decision that each year I will try to experience something new or go into a Village I haven’t been to before. I am excited to see where I find myself this year.

One Badge to Rule Them All

The single thing that I am most excited about is this year’s conference badge. For those unfamiliar, the DEF CON badge is not just a conference pass. Many years, it is an electronic device designed specifically for the event, often packed with LEDs, puzzles, hidden features, and hardware-hacking potential. Attendees collect them, modify them, reverse engineer them, and sometimes use them to interact with other badges or add-on boards. It is part art piece, part puzzle, part hardware playground, and part DEF CON tradition. This year’s badge sounds especially exciting because it appears to be more than a collectible; it is being described as a platform that people may be able to keep experimenting with long after the conference is over.

Kim Zetter at Wired just released a great article on this year’s badge, and I implore you to read it for a deep dive into why this year’s badge is so special. Read it here. I don’t want to steal any of Kim’s coverage, but I will give you just a few highlights:

• The badge is being positioned as more than a collectible. WIRED says the badge includes a removable transparent core module that can keep living after the conference as an open-source hardware security token.
• The heart of the badge is Andrew “bunnie” Huang’s Baochip-1x. It is described as a mostly open-source microcontroller designed around transparency, inspectability, and trust, with published source for major pieces like the OS, firmware, processor core, cryptographic engines, and I/O system.
• It ties directly into this year’s DEF CON theme of agency. The article explains that DEF CON wanted the badge to have a useful second life, not just become a drawer collectible after the event.
• It still sounds like a proper DEF CON badge. Beyond the security-token angle, WIRED notes that the badge includes LEDs, badge-to-badge interaction, and different visual behavior depending on badge type.

One feature of the badge that has me most excited and that wasn’t really covered in the Wired article was the inclusion of two SAO ports. SAO stands for “Shitty Add-On,” which is exactly the kind of name you would expect from hacker conference culture. SAOs are small add-on boards that plug into electronic badges, often adding LEDs, sensors, displays, buttons, or other weird and wonderful functionalities. The SAO Electrical spec can be downloaded here.

What makes their inclusion even more interesting is that DEF CON released the relevant schematics, physical measurements, clearances, and electrical specifications ahead of the conference. That gives makers time to design their own add-ons before they ever arrive in Las Vegas. Instead of everyone waiting until the badge is in their hands to start reverse engineering the connector, the community can show up with working prototypes—or at least a head start on something delightfully unnecessary. DEF CON has made it clear that the badge is intended to be a platform, and the SAO ports may be one of the easiest ways for attendees to make it their own.

That is the kind of thing I love about DEF CON: the official badge is only the starting point. The real magic happens when thousands of curious people start modifying it, extending it, and finding uses the designers may not have even imagined. This year’s badge appears to have much more extensibility than in previous years and I look forward not to only tinkering with it myself but also seeing what the rest of the community comes up with.

Next Stop Las Vegas

The conference starts this Thursday, and I am planning to post another article while I am there, so stay tuned if you are interested. I honestly do not have a solid plan as to what I will focus on this year. I am certain that I will visit some of my usual Village’s, but for the most part I am just going to see where my interests take me and hopefully find something new. Since they introduced the AI Village a few years ago, I haven’t visited the Village once. Given my recent obsession with local AI, I may spend some time there, but no promises. As always, I hope that you found this both interesting and informative and I will see you down the road.

Continue to DEF CON 34 Part II: Hands On Fun

Links

Kim Zetter’s detailed WIRED look at the DEF CON 34 badge

DEF CON 34

DEF CON 34 Badge SAO Electrical Specifications