Cyphercon is not particularly large, or in a glamorous part of the world — in fact most people who came in from out of town had to fight snow to make it. Yet when I stepped into the con last Thursday there was no doubt something awesome was in progress. People were camped out in small groups, working furiously on their computers, talks were packed with people who came alive in the Q&A, and everywhere you looked you found people deep in conversation with friends old and new. If you missed out on Cyphercon 4.0, you need to make an effort to be here for 5.0.
Join me after the break for the highlights of this two-day security conference nestled in the heart of Milwaukee.
Capture the Con
There were a ton of people working on Capture the Flag. This is a conference-wide challenge that lays out puzzles — some printed, Some digital, some like the IoT village encouraged hardware hacking — where you find a hash and enter them into a scoreboard to gain points for your team. I caught up with Trenton Ivey, who organizes this CTF and he shared the story of Capture the Con for the Hackaday Podcast.
The three gentlemen above came up with a fantastic idea. As I wrote about last week, the Cyphercon badge included a paper tape reader. You could unlock parts of the badge and gain flags by running tape through, but you were limited on how many tapes you could get the badge table to produce. These three brought a laser printer and transparency film. Since the reader is infrared, they printed black bars with empty spots for the “hole” and ran them through the badge to limited success.
There were a ton of people working on cracking the tape codes, and also asking everyone they could find to scan the QR code they received at registration (to score a quick 5 points). The other activity tons were working on was the Cypher Village challenge. You picked up a post card with the starter cipher on it. Once you got that you could go back and get a deck of cards. These cards are a visual puzzle, but you need more than one set to complete it and begin to discover and solve the puzzles within.
You Might Just Learn A …read more
Source:: Hackaday