Events

A Visual Guide to Day-Con 9

Welcome to Dayton

In mid-October our friend Bryan Fite aka Angus Blitter invited the community for the ninth edition of Day-Con. Bryan’s annual security summit, which we regard as the sister event of TROOPERS, is a pretty good reason to visit lovely Dayton, Ohio.

Day-Con Summit

And so we did… ERNW sent in five delegates. Delegates is Day-Con-speak for all attendees and speakers and such a subtle choice of wording sets the tone for the whole event. People seemed to be really focused and the roundtable-like setting during the talks (see above) provided a cozy atmosphere for in-depth expert chatting.

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Building

Some Design Aspects of Hacking Challenges

We’re currently starting the preparation for the Troopers15 PacketWars Challenge, and since I’ve participated in quite some CTF games and have been involved in the preparation of a number of PacketWars Battles, I thought I’d write down some thoughts on the design of hacking challenges.

First of all, my experience is limited almost exclusively to attack-defend-CTFs or interactive war games (such as PacketWars or CCDC). While thinking about this blogpost, I also came across several terms which are used, so I decided to give a short summary:

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Events

Packetwars, Sun & Skills

During the last days, some of our guys (including me) had some great days in Dayton. Rene, Christopher, Hendrik, Sergej, and me flew in to give workshops and presentations at Day-Con as well as to compete in the infamous PacketWars game. While Day-Con is a one day event, the two days before the conference comprised workshops on secure iOS integration (given by Rene) and IPv6 security (given by Christopher). Since the overall topic of the conference was trust, Rene gave a keynote on broken trust which was based exemplary trust analysis, development of a trust metric, and different trust factors. Those trust factors were also used in my talk about evaluation methodologies for cloud service providers (regular followers will recognize some of the content of both talks from different posts 😉 ). There were also talks from Sergey Bratus, Graeme Neilson and Angus Blitter. While Sergey proposed a sound (not to say academic 😉 ) definition on the classification of vulnerabilities and their connection to turing complete input languages, Angus gave an introduction to PowerLine technologies and laid out, that these technologies still suffer from naive assumptions about trusted networks (he also refered to this). The day after the conference, the ERNW Allstars had to defend their championship title in PacketWars. Since the first battle was scheduled for 10AM, we had quite some time to tan in the sunny 30°C weather, recover from the conference and prepare the expected victory celebration (some of you might remember some “Champagne tradition” from Troopers). In face of this motivation, we rushed through the 3 battles and were able to score first place second year in a row. At this point, kudos to the two other participating teams who gave us a tough battle, especially during the reversing challenges.

 

Have a great week, Matthias

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