{"id":25043,"date":"2022-08-15T17:29:28","date_gmt":"2022-08-15T22:29:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=25043"},"modified":"2022-08-15T17:29:28","modified_gmt":"2022-08-15T22:29:28","slug":"defcon-30-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=25043","title":{"rendered":"DEFCON 30 notes."},"content":{"rendered":"

Lawrence<\/a> (who I hope is feeling better<\/a>) pinged me over the weekend about missing DEFCON 30 coverage. (At least, that’s what I think<\/strong> he was pinging me about: his email was kind of cryptic.)<\/p>\n

There are some things going on here.<\/p>\n

One is that, as I said last week<\/a>, I was in a mood. It takes a lot of time and effort to pull together the preliminary list of DEFCON panels, the day to day coverage, and the post-DEFCON writeups. That effort is even harder now, because Twitter has pretty much removed the ability to view more than a couple of a person’s tweets without being signed in. I just didn’t have it in me last week.<\/p>\n

Which kind of leads to the second reason: it just doesn’t seem that my DEFCON coverage gets the level of engagement that justifies the effort. As far as I can tell, people just aren’t all that interested in it. That may be (probably is) a flaw on my part as a writer, it may be that my audience just isn’t interested in computer security subjects, or it may be that I’m completely misreading what people are interested in.<\/p>\n

It also feels like DEFCON has moved beyond me in the post-Wuhan Flu world. It used to feel like a gathering of one of my tribes. Now, it costs $360 (“with a processing fee of $9.66 added to online orders”). Masks are required. And supposedly, you may run into trouble with the hotel<\/a> if you want to bring a legal firearm<\/a>. (Hattip: McThag<\/a>.) They’re also still doing that weird “semi-hybrid” model again, and I’m just not willing to spend a bunch of time hanging out on Discord.<\/p>\n

(I’m pretty sure I stayed at that “s–tball” Travelodge on my last DEFCON trip. “they just want their $56 per night and prefer you to not leave used heroin works in the potted plants outside” seems pretty accurate.)<\/p>\n

The last thing is: I’ve seen almost no other coverage or discussion of DEFCON 30 this year. At least not in the places I’d expect to see it: Wired, ArsTechnica, or HackerNews. ThreatGrid did a round-up post this morning<\/a> if you want a different take than mine, but other than that, I’ve seen nothing.<\/p>\n

I went and checked the schedule (which you can find here<\/a>: I haven’t found the media server yet.) One thing that is really nice is that they’ve added much more information to the schedule entries, including links and references where available.<\/p>\n

And…there just are not a lot of presentations this year that I find interesting. I can see why people would be interested in “Computer Hacks in the Russia-Ukraine War<\/a>“, but at only 20 minutes, I have questions.<\/p>\n

Maybe “Wireless Keystroke Injection (WKI) via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)<\/a>” because Bluetooth, but that’s not so much breaking Bluetooth as it is pretending to be a legit Bluetooth device.<\/p>\n

“The PACMAN Attack: Breaking PAC on the Apple M1 with Hardware Attacks<\/a>” and “Process injection: breaking all macOS security layers with a single vulnerability<\/a>” probably have some relevance to Apple folks. So does “The hitchhacker\u2019s guide to iPhone Lightning & JTAG hacking<\/a>“. And I can see the interest in “Glitched on Earth by humans: A Black-Box Security Evaluation of the SpaceX Starlink User Terminal<\/a>“, but I don’t have a Starlink terminal to play with.<\/p>\n

“You\u2019re Muted<\/del> Rooted”<\/a> has the Zoom thing going for it. I’ll confess to a small amount of interest in “HACK THE HEMISPHERE! How we (legally) broadcasted hacker content to all of North America using an end-of-life geostationary satellite, and how you can set up your own broadcast too!<\/a>” and no interest at all in this year’s “Hippy, please<\/em>.”<\/a> one.<\/p>\n

“Defeating Moving Elements in High Security Keys”<\/a> does sort of get my attention. And that’s the last thing that does.<\/p>\n

It just feels smaller and less interesting. Perhaps DEFCON is still finding their footing again after the last two years. I don’t know. I also don’t know if I’m going to do anything next year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lawrence (who I hope is feeling better) pinged me over the weekend about missing DEFCON 30 coverage. (At least, that’s what I think he was pinging me about: his email was kind of cryptic.) There are some things going on here. One is that, as I said last week, I was in a mood. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,179,189,209,70],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple","category-bluetooth","category-defcon","category-defcon-30","category-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25043"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25060,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25043\/revisions\/25060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}