Defcon 19

A few weeks ago I attended the 19th edition of Defcon in Las Vegas. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Defcon is a large annual hacker conference. There are a number of talks on various topics of interest to this subculture, such as computer security, the law and digital rights, novel uses of hardware, lockpicking, etc. There are also a number of workshops, contests, “villages”, vendors, and art expositions. It’s really a fantastic experience.

I arrived on a Thursday and left that Sunday. But in that short space of time, I was able to see old friends, make new ones, and see some really interesting talks. My favourite one was on bit flipping due to what the speaker suspected was non-ECC memory being affected by cosmic radiation, and how that could be exploited.

All the contests they had running were really cool, but this one had me laughing out loud. It was the beer cooling contest. As these guys had their set up running, you could see the liquid nitrogen escape out onto the ground.

Another fun event to watch was the hacker jeopardy. You got points for getting the answers right, but you also got points per beer bottle you consumed during the match. By the end of one game, all three teams had negative scores (until the beers were taken into account.)

But it was really hanging out with friends that made this so fun, and with my interest in compsec taking a back seat, it’s really the prime reason I’d come back again. So cheers to Alex, Jean-Marc, Logan, Nick, StankDawg, Lattera, Zandi, Murd0c, and Jason Scott.

Everyone attending was fantastic to be around. Whenever I sat down for a talk, I’d talk to the people around me. I met individuals from all walks of life – nursing, security, hardware architects, etc. I had breakfast with a really nice attendee from the Bay area, and we were both into food. We started to trade recipes and advice.

The talks were good. I already mentioned the one about memory corruption, but I also liked Jason Scott’s talk on the value of archiving sites that host people’s personal expression, Mikko Hypponen’s presentation on malware history, Steven Levvy’s thoughts on his writing career, the talk by Adrian Crenshaw (Irongeek) on de-anonymizing TOR, and the Defcon network team on how they set up and secured it all.

Other fun stuff to see at the con:

• The “Wall of Sheep”, which displayed usernames and passwords of people who used unsecured connections on the unsecured network.

• “Mohawk Con”, one of the many fund raisers at the conference. If I remember correctly, I think close to $40,000 US was raised that weekend for non-profits. You can see a girl shaving someone’s head behind the sign in the image below.

• The robotic cock fight, in the midst of the capture-the-flag contest.

• A showing of the movie “Hackers”, starring Angelina Jolie and um… Angelina Jolie. Jeff Moss (aka. Dark Tangent, the guy behind Defcon) prefaced the film by talking about how it was actually intended to be based a bit off of the early nineties rivalry between Legion of Doom (LOD) and Masters of Deception (MOD). One character in the film has an overbearing mother, and according to Moss, there was really a guy whose mom you could hear yelling in the background during telephone calls.
• A lockpicking and hardware hacking village, where you could get your hands dirty and learn the basics or work on your own projects. I wanted to buy a lockpick gun, but didn’t think I could get it across the border back home.

• “QueerCon”, where LGBTers and allies could socialize. Unfortunately, the music at the main party was quite loud, so it was really tough to talk to new individuals – and I missed the quieter socials. Next time.
• A chillout lounge where you could sit down and relax. A dragon with psychadelic video projected onto it hung from the ceiling, a DJ was there spinning tunes, and neat artwork peppered the area.

…and this is just scratching the surface of what there was to do.

As for Vegas itself, I enjoyed good food and good weather. I was kicked out of a restaurant with my cousin and his friend, a first for all of us, for what I assume was being obnoxious/loud in French.

So many people I encountered complained about the heat while I was there. I found it really pleasant. Yes it was hot, but it was dry heat. I’d take a 42C in Vegas over a 30C in Ottawa any day.

Relevant: My blog post about attending Defcon 17 two years ago.