My experience is one of 30,000 other unique DEFCON experiences. Indeed, even if you spend the entire time with a certain person, your DEFCON is still going to be different.
For me the conference started with one of the two workshops that I was lucky to book in 1.5 seconds before they were sold out. The first one was called an Introduction to Cryptographic Attacks yet it deserved a whole PhD degree in Math and Cryptography🙂Before we started, a flash drive with the virtual machine image was passed around which made me think about the irony of a simple attack vector at a hackers convention. The workshop covered common attack vectors on RSA such as guessing d, cycle attacks, common modulus, factoring the public key and low exponent attack. The last one brought me back to my school years when I learned Chinese Remainder Theorem but from a pure Math prospective. The most interesting part was of course, performing the attacks on the machine and after four hours my brain restored the majority of Math formulas that I learned at school.
If anyone wants to catch the sharks in the sea of traffic, the Hands-On TCP/IP Deep Dive with Wireshark workshop is ideal for that. I did not expect a lot out of this particular event since I had participated in a TCP/IP workshop last year. Indeed, how much could you tell about TCP/IP? Maybe write a book or ten… Chris Greer, a security analyst and YouTuber, changed my perception of the protocols. A tool like Wireshark looked straightforward and simple until I attended this workshop. We deep dived into the handshake, sequence/ack numbers, retransmissions, etc. I no longer see the packet analysis as a tedious process. By working on the pcap files, I practiced making templates, filters and analyzing each particular request to find the exact one that caused a problem. Overall, I subscribed to Chris’s YouTube channel to get to know more tricks.
My next stop at DEFCON was the village world. Compared to DEFCON 2022, this year felt even more crowded. Some of the hallways were even blocked for some time, that is why I started with one of the funniest yet not the easiest field in hacking, the lock picking. I was so happy when my first ever lock picked during DEFCON 2023! Hours spent in the village feel as minutes and I was able to make some connections with people who came from France, Canada, and Germany.
Last but not the least…Did you know that your Amazon package can be opened and taped again with no traces left? This is about evidence tampering village. A liquid in the syringe is injected between the tape and the box leaving no chances for a package owner to know if somebody opened it before. I have left some surprises in my box for the next person;)
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