Defcon 17 Badge Hack

Defcon 17 Badge Hack

At Defcon 17 I competed with some friends in the badge hack contest. Friends had a home built Geiger counter,shown here with a hacked EFF “cat looks at butt” sticker. We interfaced it to the badge along with a wireless link and developed firmware that would allow the Geiger counter badge to send truly random bits to a PC for cryptographically secure key generation. The old FirmWarez site features a screen capture of that project in process.

We were one of the featured badge hack entries in Wired’s “Threat Level” blog.

Check out the “cat looks at butt” picture again. Upper left an old fashioned 7805 regulator is hot glued to the case. We needed +5V. Most of the stuff in our system was either +12V or +3.3V. I walked in to the HHV (hardware hacking village), went to the junk box, stood there, looking at boards, and thought “yeah, that one will have a 7805”. First board I picked up, and I was right. DefCon moment.

Kingpin posted a video of our entry. You can briefly see my Uzitalk t-shirt. We were only slightly radioactive.

For more info on the Defcon 17 badge, see this page at Grand Idea Studios.

Photo by Abraxas3D.

FirmWarez badge hacking



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