This is my short write up on Daycon X1, 2017. The summit was held at Dayton, the land where Wright brothers were born. Apart from being my first US trip, I also gave my first training on Hacking 101 also called the Bootcamp.
The Daycon X1 bootcamp started on 18th September. Ahmad, my colleague focused on web security, network scanning and metasploit exercises. I mainly handled classes on reversing and binary exploitation along with some pcap anaylsis and network attacks. It was highly fulfilling experience to give a workshop. Teaching is definitely the best way to learn any topic by digging deep into it.The simpler you can explain, the more clarity you have on the topic. But I must say that it was indeed exhausting by the end of three days.
More familiar faces started appearing on Wednesday after the bootcamp. They were none other than the faces whom I know from TROOPERS17. There was a short meeting on Wednesday evening where we discussed blockchains and crypto currencies. It was new to me as I had never spent enough time reading in detail about block chains. But I realised that it is a very highly fascinating area. Bryan led the discussion and Graeme, Jacob and Virgil added a lot more insights into the topic that made it a really interesting discussion. On Thursday, the main conference began with Ryan’s keynote. He talked about wearable devices and bio hacks that uses artificial intelligence to intervene human actions. He focused on various aspects including security, safety and usability. The keynote was followed by a debate/discussion by Brittany, Graeme and Bryan about protecting the rights of robots. There were various interesting questions raised such as privacy of robots, humanness of robots, should robots lie etc. After that great intro into Daycon, the conference proceeded with many other interesting discussions and idea sharing. Micheal Ossman’s keynote on Friday was very thought provoking. He walked us through the story of Church of robotrons and the mutant saviour and the futile nature of the cyber security world. There were other talks including my talk on ‘Sniffing VoLTE traffic’. There was also a 5Km hacker run on Friday morning before we started the day. The day concluded with a fantastic dinner and party, thanks to Jo, Chris and Bill who helped Bryan with the organisation.
The last day, Saturday, became the best day with the group hacking event, Packetwars. I played with the team Rootkit. There were 8 or 9 teams in total. The first challenge was lock picking. It was very disappointing that we couldn’t open the lock in the given time. It was even more disappointing that all other teams did. 😛 But the heat of the disappointment made us power through the second challenge with the highest score and bonus points for being the first to finish. The challenge was to analyse a USB stick and do some forensics. The third challenge, and the final challenge involved making an SSH proxy and exploiting rsh vulns. We were close to solving it when the time was up. None of the teams managed to solve the last challenge.Our lock picking score didn’t help with winning any prize in Packetwars, but it was a memorable team event where we all made some good friends and had a lot of fun! The conference concluded with a great Speakers party. It was some awesome music, dance and a drag show at a place called The Masque. Overall, it was a great week with a lot of learning and fun. I really enjoyed the conference. Looking forward to go to another Daycon.
P.S: Thanks to Niki and Hendrik for all the help and support with my preparations to Daycon.
Cheers,
Priya