DEFCON 27 starts a little later than I’m used to this year (August 8th, so a week from today.) Black Hat 2019 starts August 7th. Black Hat schedule is here. DEFCON schedule is here.
Again this year, I’m not going. While I feel like I’m moving closer to the point where I’m ready to return (expenses paid or expenses unpaid) I’m not quite where I want to be yet to go on my own dime. And as far as the company paying for me to go…not this year, for reasons I won’t go into. (Nothing bad. At least I don’t think so. Just don’t want to run my mouth about internal stuff.)
So, as usual: what would I go to, if I were going?
Let’s look at the DEFCON schedule first.
On Thursday, there’s nothing I’m really interested in until Philippe Laulheret‘s “Intro to Embedded Hacking—How you too can find a decade old bug in widely deployed devices. [REDACTED] Deskphones, a case study.” Mostly because I’m curious which deskphone he was banging on: I have a theory…
Friday:
It’d be a toss-up at 10:00 between Joe Grand‘s “Behind the Scenes of the DEF CON 27 Badge” and “Duplicating Restricted Mechanical Keys” with Robert and Bill Graydon.
At 11:00, the only thing that grabs me is “All the 4G modules Could be Hacked” with XiaoHuiHui, Ye Zhang, and ZhengHuang. “…all of them have similar vulnerabilities, including remote access with weak passwords, command injection of AT Command/listening services, OTA upgrade spoofing, command injection by SMS, and web vulnerability. Through these vulnerabilities we were able to get to the shell of these devices.”
At 12:00: “Phreaking Elevators” with Will C. Yes, this turns my crank: I’ve always wondered about those elevator phones…
13:00: to what extent do I care about hacking HVAC systems or high security electronic locks? Not really sure: both “HVACking: Understand the Difference Between Security and Reality!” with Douglas McKee and Mark Bereza, and phar’s “No Mas – How One Side-Channel Flaw Opens Atm, Pharmacies and Government Secrets Up to Attack” could be interesting, but I might take a break at this time instead.
My school days are long past me, but Bill Demirkapi‘s “Are Your Child’s Records at Risk? The Current State of School Infosec” at 14:00 sounds promising. But then, so does “Harnessing Weapons of Mac Destruction” with Patrick Wardle.
At 15:00, “Change the World, cDc Style: Cow tips from the first 35 years” might be fun, but I don’t think I want to go unless Beto Robert Francis O’Rourke is on the panel. I think I’d do “100 Seconds of Solitude: Defeating Cisco Trust Anchor With FPGA Bitstream Shenanigans” with Jatin Kataria, Rick Housley, and Ang Cui instead, for professional reasons.
“I Know What You Did Last Summer: 3 Years of Wireless Monitoring at DEF CON” with darkmatter at 16:00 is only 20 minutes and sounds fun, as does “Poking the S in SD cards” with Nicolas Oberli.
And that takes us to Saturday. While I kind of like Bruce Schneier, there’s nothing that excites me at 10:00. At 11:00, I might go to “HAKC THE POLICE“, because the idea of anti speed radar countermeasures intrigues me. But for some reason, I’m really skeptical. I want to give Bill Swearingen the benefit of the doubt, so I’ll keep an eye out for slides.
12:00: “Defeating Bluetooth Low Energy 5 PRNG for Fun and Jamming” with Damien Cauquil. Hooray Bluetooth! “Why You Should Fear Your “mundane” Office Equipment” with Daniel Romero and Mario Rivas could be fun, too, but I’ve seen my share of hacking printer panels.
At 13:00: “GSM: We Can Hear Everyone Now!” with Campbell Murray, Eoin Buckley, and James Kulikowski. “The presentation demonstrates that the security of the A5/1 and A5/3 ciphers used to protect cellular calls are vulnerable to compromise leading to full decryption of GSM communications, using freely available open source solutions along with our tools we developed for this task.”
The period between 14:00 and 16:00 looks like a good time for downtime and browsing the dealer’s room. Though “SELECT code_execution FROM * USING SQLite;—Gaining code execution using a malicious SQLite database” with Omar Gull at 14:00 and “Reverse-Engineering 4g Hotspots for Fun, Bugs and Net Financial Loss” with g richter at 15:00 could be promising. (The second one, though, sounds similar to the one at 11:00 on Friday.)
If I didn’t decide to take off early, I’d probably go to “NOC NOC. Who’s there? All. All who? All the things you wanted to know about the DEF CON NOC and we won’t tell you about” at 16:00.
And now we’re into Sunday. At 10:00: “Adventures In Smart Buttplug Penetration (testing)“. No. Just No.
There’s actually three talks that interest me at 11:00: “SDR Against Smart TVs: URL and Channel Injection Attacks” with Pedro Cabrera Camara (because SDR), “Exploiting Qualcomm WLAN and Modem Over The Air” with Xiling Gong and Peter Pi, and “Say Cheese – How I Ransomwared Your DSLR Camera” with Eyal Itkin.
I have to deal a lot professionally with Azure, so “I’m In Your Cloud… Pwning Your Azure Environement” at 12:00 with Dirk-jan Mollema is a must. After that, there’s not much that interests me until the closing ceremonies: though looking at the schedule, it seems like they’ve broken out contest awards into a separate ceremony at 14:00.
What of Black Hat? Well, it’s kind of weird. There’s a lot of “sponsored sessions” and “sponsored workshops“, most of which don’t interest me at first glance.
Just looking at the briefings schedule, there still isn’t much that grabs me. There are more than a few Black Hat talks that overlap with DEFCON presentations I mentioned above, so I’m not mentioning them a second time. (Robert Francis isn’t speaking at Black Hat, either.)
“Attacking and Defending the Microsoft Cloud (Office 365 & Azure AD)” (11:15 Wednesday) is professionally relevant to me. “Look, No Hands! — The Remote, Interaction-less Attack Surface of the iPhone” (2:40 PM Wednesday) could be interesting. “Deconstructing the Phishing Campaigns that Target Gmail Users” (5:05 PM Wednesday) is also professionally relevant, but I kind of also want to see “Reverse Engineering WhatsApp Encryption for Chat Manipulation and More” at the same time.
On Thursday: I’m vaguely intrigued by “All Your Apple are Belong to Us: Unique Identification and Cross-Device Tracking of Apple Devices” (9:45 AM), “Behind the scenes of iOS and Mac Security” (12:10 PM), and “Infighting Among Russian Security Services in the Cyber Sphere” (also 12:10 PM).
Other strong possibilities: “Inside the Apple T2” (2:30 PM), “Attacking iPhone XS Max” (3:50 PM), and “Moving from Hacking IoT Gadgets to Breaking into One of Europe’s Highest Hotel Suites” at 5:00 PM (because it’s a break from Apple stuff, plus Bluetooth!)
That’s pretty much all I’ve got. Everyone should know the drill by now:
- If there’s something you want me to pay attention to, leave a comment.
- If you’re a presenter who thinks I’m giving you short shrift, or wants some love for your presentation, leave a comment.
- If you think I’m a jerk in general, leave a comment.