Security Conferences

I attend various meetups and conferences to hack code and pick locks with folks and otherwise geek out. Most of these events are centered around computer security, but there is a lot of crossover with lockpicking. I'll be documenting with text and pictures any security events I hang out at here.

The Next Hope

I just got back from this year's HOPE conference and had a great time. For those that don't know, Hope is a security con that is held once every two years. It is similar to Defcon but tends to attract a more colorful crowd and is a bit more politically and socially aware. My own politics/ethics(I'm not a socialist/hippy) differed greatly from the majority of these folks. This is not a bad thing! It made for some lively debate and fun conversations in which a mutual respect was enjoyed.

The biggest story from the con was surely the Wikileaks affair. I'm not going to explain the whole story here, but I encourage you to give a google for some of the terms I mention here and explore the reports. Jacob Appelbaum gave a presentation on behalf of Wikileaks, spoke about the organization, and praised Bradley Manning. After the talk, a doppleganger dressed as Jacob and surrounded by staff ran out of the room as a decoy. This was done to distract the feds...Oh yes, there were several civilian-clothes feds standing in the back of the room. By the time the presentation started, everyone there knew exactly who they were (Jacob ackowledged them as well). Anyway, the speaker slipped out the back way and flew back to Europe. At the end, the famous leaked video 'Collateral Murder' was shown.

There was a second talk given by a panel..and Adrian Lamo. This is the guy that informed on Manning after he bragged about leaking classified diplomatic documents to Wikileaks. As a result, Manning is sitting in jail in Kuwait basically waiting for his life to be ruined. This was, by far, the most hostile audience I've ever seen (which made it entertaining). Lamo showed a lot of guts by getting up there and defending his actions. Given the views of the majority of the crowd, this talk could have gone much worse than it did. Attending these talks and seeing both sides of the story was a good time.

As usual, I spent most of my time in the lockpicking village. I gave a few introductory talks, talked locks, met old and new friends. One of the folks that I was surprised to meet was Clyde Roberson of Medeco who stopped by to check the place out. I was also excited to meet a fellow who goes by the alias nostromo who brought along a ton of homebrew tools and was very generous with them. He was still teaching newbies toward the end of the con when many of us were getting burned out. I also enjoyed meeting sfi72; this guy can pick! Of course, the regulars were there and it was great seeing these folks again: Doug, Schuyler, Squelchtone, Matt Fiddler, Eric Michaud, Babak, and of course Deviant Ollam. I know there were others, but this paragraph is already heading toward being just a listing of cool people. Anyway, I also gave a Medecoder-building workshop to 10 participants and a few spectators. Being relative newbies and one out-of-practice has-been, we didn't have as much success opening the locks as I hoped. But I accomplished the goal of teaching everyone one how to build the tools and how to use them. Please keep practicing, improve the design, and let me know how it goes. This was definitely the most successful lockpicking village at Hope yet; it was packed most of the time despite being somewhat hidden away. Although we do not approve of this sort of behavior, it was somewhat amusing to see things like this around the hotel.

There were also quite a few picking contests happening that were a lot of fun. Schuyler Towne won the final round of Lockpicking Wizard against Doug Farre. The original goal was to throw a bunch of locks and tools into burlap sack and get them open without looking. For the final round, this was done outside the sacks with blindfolds on for the enjoyment of the audience. It was an awesome contest and everyone had a great time; this one needs to stay around. After I abandoned Doug Farre to watch a talk, Jgor teamed up with Schuyler to win the Defiant Challenge contest. This involves picking as many locks as possible while handcuffed together and then escaping the cuffs in the final seconds. My favorite contest was much less frenzied and lasted 24 hours; the Points Competition. Jgor won this one and did an awesome job; I believe he opened two more locks than I did which left me with second place. I missed the Connect-4 contest which involved picking locks on a board to create rows of locks before your opponnent. The craziest contest was the Banana Contest. This invited everyone that could fit to simutaneously start picking a big connected cluster of easy padlocks as fast as they could before the timer ran out. Doug Farre killed this one but everyone had an awesome time.

I also checked out part of Robert Steele's talk. I say "part of" because the man talked about politics, intelligence, and tradecraft for 8 hours. To make this clear, he did an 8 hour long question/answer forum. It was funny watching the hippies attempt to use this as a platform to tell everyone about their various pet causes instead of inciting meaningful dialogue. Thankfully, he shot these guys down quickly to keep it moving. If Steele had let all of these guys go on about everything from eating vegan to 9/11; he would still be there. While I'm mentioning talks, there is a website that is getting updated right now with video of all of the presentations: HatTorrents. Check these out, there are some good ones.

The con wasn't all rainbows and gummi-bears, however. My magstripe room door lock decided that its battery could give out. So after relying on random cleaning staff folks walking around to let me in for a while (no ID, knowledge, or social engineering needed, btw; just ask), I asked for maintenance. They didn't solve the problem, but did let me get a look at their door programmer while fumbling with it. The airport was insanity with delayed flights and cancellations. My advice: never fly AirTran..ever. I ended up spending around 20 hours solid sitting in the airport and only got home in less than 3 days (literally the alternative) by taking a refund and buying a very expensive one-way ticket. I won't go into all the details but the experience included a flight that was 2 hours late and 3 hours on the tarmac before returning to the gate to refuel.

Overall, this was a great time and I recommend everyone try to make it out there for one of these. I met so many more interesting people and saw cool things than I can fit here. As I dig up good links, videos, etc.. from Hope; they'll be integrated here. See you guys at Defcon :-)

Los Angeles Locksport

This is a brand new group that Datagram and I started up in LA. Its hosted by a hackerspace called Null Space Labs which is an awesome location. I drive up from San Diego to attend these meetups and recommend you all do the same. There is good chance that this will become a Locksport International chapter in the future; we are still gauging interest at the moment. We are meeting on the third Friday of every month for now, but keep an eye on the Locksports Local forum at lp101 for updates.

18JUN10 - Tons of people showed up for this one. Some we knew and lots that we didn't. Datagram gave an epic presentation that lasted for hours. We played around with using cooking molds to cast copies of keys and it was a lot of fun. There were so many interested folks that we ran out of chairs. If this is the future of LA Locksport; I welcome it.

21MAY10 - We had a pretty good turnout of around 8 people for this first meeting. Datagram gave an introductory picking talk. The fellow that runs the space, M, figured out a way to non-destructively defeat the new Master One padlocks. It turns out, you can just remove the security screws from the back and play with the mechanism to open the lock. Datagram and I worked on picking BiLock a bit and are getting very close. There was also some discussion on future meeting ideas; building lever locks and doing impressioning are planned.