So guys, here is a quick update as I wake up on Sunday morning:
Thursday: I got my awesome badge (pictures will be coming soon, I promise), and I started looking for people I knew in the community. LosT and my friends who also got in that day. (Days to DefCon: 1). This is also the day the ToxicBBQ happened. The Toxic BBQ is where everyone who comes in early goes, it is basically a big party where people bring drinks (mostly liquor and beer) and meat. Then these BBQ specialists as they like to be called start cooking the meat. Now, you are asked to bring your own meat and drinks, however some people buy more meat than they could ever eat. This is what becomes community food, and you can grab one of it. Then you make friends with someone and get beer. Pretty simple right? It certainly was. I met all kinds of people at the ToxicBBQ and in general had a lot of fun until the police came and broke us up at 1945 saying we had to be out of there by 2030. They were afraid that it would get rowdy and someone was going to do something stupid considering it was a huge group of people all wearing black clothes (hackers for the win) drinking. Shame really, as previous years it had run until very late into the night being a party for everyone involved. I will make sure to be part of this again.
Friday: After not sleeping for more than an hour we head out. It is now 0900, we are all excited and ready to go. We first go check out the talk that Joe Grand [
http://grandideastudio.com/] was presenting on. He is the guy that build the badges, which this year were ****ing awesome again! They light up, as always, and you can program your own scrolling messages on it, it also has Point of Vision which means if you wave it in front of your face just right you get to see DefCon. The badges this year also had places to put new ZigBee on it to have it do wireless. And a place to put an accelerometer. This was to facilitate badge hacking which I did not do since I was busy with the LosT @ Con mystery challenge.
Next up I went to a talk about Bruce Schneier, which was REALLY awesome. This guy is the end all and be all of encryption and hashing algorithms. He is a genius. He knows his stuff EXTREMELY well, which is always refreshing as some people there claim to know what they are doing but really have no clue.
Then came the time, it was 1300 hours, and LosT released his boxes upon the crowd. Well, that is what we had hoped would happen, instead he passed us a small little box that contained a piece of paper with random words on it, some numbers and some other clues. And a ton of round little circular pieces of paper with letters on them. We then had to figure out what encryption he had used, and decrypt it. Go to LosT and get our actual Mystery Box. I am sure someone from UAT will blog about it with pictures, so I will link to it then. But the point was to get through two locks at the top, get the instructions and the breadboard and other pieces to make a certain circuit that was displayed on the paper. We then had to use this circuit to listen to what an LED was outputting. You can flicker an LED at the same speed as speech, and then with a photo resistor you can get that sound back out of the LED straight into some head phones to then listen to it. The LED will look like any other LED, so unknown to anyone it could be spitting out random messages that only certain people know of. It really is pretty cool, will ask LosT for the schematics and post em here if you guys want to try that out for yourself.
It was about 8 hours after the challenge started that we finished phase 1. Then when we got our mystery box we were told it was not to be tipped as it would then cause the circuit to burn itself out and that would mean we could not get the secret it held. This was off course not true at all, but it made for some fun times. We got through the top two locks by picking them. The bottom lock however we never got through, instead we used a dremel and cut through the metal bar that was holding the last plate in place with the last clue. We finally got it, but did not finish until the next day at 1235 since we decided to call it quits for the day since LosT had packed up his stuff which meant at the time 0200 we could not listen to the message he had pre-recorded for us. In the end the circuit on the outside looked like it did something, but it ended up being mis-information to misguide us into thinking that we could not tip the box and to have the lock pick the bottom lock while lying down. Did I mention that these boxes were made of solid steel? It weighed at least a good 40 - 50 lbs.
LosT's challenge was really fun, especially since we had a good 15 people in a tiny hotel room with all kinds of weird sounds coming from it, a Dremel tool makes a lot of noise. All around it was the thing I was looking forward to the most and it was totally worth my time, which was really cool.
This was also the day that Dave Bolmon, the provost of UAT took about 15 guys of the UAT crew, really whoever wanted to go with us to a small tapa's place down on the strip, and he bought for all of us! For some broke students it was the greatest ever. Dave is a really cool guy, and was there to listen to us, and also talk to us, not just about school but about other things as well. He is one of the most down to earth guys you can get when it comes to the school. This was another highlight.
. More later!
