Certainly overdue for some updates here. I have been a very busy man, but I’ll aim to get some of the pen-and-ink things I have been working on over the course of the year up here. I had my first harmonic (a boy!) in March and that has consumed a lot of my life. Anyway, there are a couple of items in particular that I have been excited about.

First, I attended my first DEF CON this year in Las Vegas. There is much more to do there than you can possibly fit into the time alloted. In the future, I will certainly be spending much less time vying to get into talks and more time playing in the miscellaneous ‘villages’ and perhaps do some of the competition myself. I was fortunate to not only have the event paid for by work this year, but the stars aligned and I was accompanied by my very good friend and uber-smart guy Dell-Ray Sackett. I would be remiss to say that I didn’t enjoy the talks – but the pragmatic side of me wanted to spend every waking moment (and nearly did). at the different villiages.

In fact, while near the wireless villiage, we saw a gentleman with a directional Yagi antenna and quickly became piqued. Before we knew it, we had signed up for a fox hunt and were in first place up until the last day. Quick aside, we were the first team to find all beacons and decode them, we also found that the first transmitter was not allocating enough time to send its entire message, thus truncating a portion. After we informed the judges, they fixed it and another team swooped in for the win. C’est la vie

We also attended a fantastic workshop with Eijah, the creator of Demonsaw called C++ for hackers. Fantastic class, more to come on my worked examples there! Another funny aside, we were walking in the parking garage on the second day and were invited to a roof-top party at Larry Flynt’s Hustler’s club. We didn’t go because (amongst many reasons) the guy inviting us seemed like a boozed out grafter. As it turns out that guy was John McAfee of McAfee anti-virus. Who has also paired with Eijah for Demonsaw XD.

One cool event that I didn’t know of until perhaps the second-to-last day was the DC Darknet. That consisted of a hardware device (based on the popular 328P microcontroller – same as the Arduino) alongside a set of real-world challenges (lock picking, social engineering, et alia). After you completed these, you could place codes that you gained from the events on their daemon and gain points. I found something interesting though in a dump of their firmware. There is a portion of the contest where you hold your badge up to another participants and exchange private keys to get a code for the daemon. Well, it is based on the very-easy-to-break tiny encryption algorithm (one of the same things that makes WEP vulnerable). Dell and I thought this was an interesting attack vector. Subsequently, I have uploaded some of the C I’ve been working on for that here.

Beyond that I have been steadily working on other crypto, particularly those involved with the DEF CON badge challenge and those presented by the winners of this years badge challenge The Council of Nine. Funny story there too. The same day we participated in the foxhunt, we had sat down outside of the chill lounge and were talking about aspects of statistical analysis on the Shavian-alphabet on the front of the DEF CON badge and were uploading our findings thus far to a wiki that we were collaborating with others on (which was later attacked and erased :( ). I saw a guy walking by with a Feynman shirt on (I’ve read nearly every book by Feynman, huge fan). I remarked to the gentleman that I liked the shirt. As it turns out, the guy was 1o57! The guy who designs the badges.

I have started to uploade old code-bases in miscellaneous languages from college as well as some Gists that I have uploaded based on collaboration/illustration with others.

Things I’m presently working on and will update as they roll out:

• DSSS / CDMA illustration in Python

• DC Darknet badge attack (Wiring and C)

• Working with Cisco onePK and Python for network automation

• Possible scrub-crypto project with Dell

• Some others which may not see the light of day