We want to give badges to hackers doing cool things. Sponsors came up big for us this year but we need your help to close the gap. Support the project as a philanthropist and we will set aside a badge just for you. As a philanthropist you're an enabler of shenanigans and helping us do what we love doing, giving these away for free during DEF CON, virtually and in-person.
There are several things you should understand before shutting up and giving us your money.
- Due to the toilet paper and microcontroller shortage caused by COVID we altered the plan for DC29...and decided (a few weeks ago) to design a new badge made entirely of passives. It is different from what we normally do, so we are showing it to you ahead of time with minor details REDACTED per NSA and Matt Damon guidelines.
- This badge will still have multiple challenges, including hardware hacking, reverse engineering, and cryptography
- We don’t want to spoil the challenges with a walkthrough, so here are the facts:
- The core badge serves as a backplane
- The artwork on the front PCBs are castellated and include circuit traces
- The passive components must be soldered in addition to the front PCBs
- The component identifiers are printed with silkscreen...in a cipher...how about them apples?
- Batteries Included! The schematic is not! LOLZ!
- The badge is roughly the size of your vaccination card for no particular reason.
- The cost is lower than usual because we are crowdsourcing the assembly to you
- It requires a soldering iron, solder, and flux or an intern; whatever, we’re not the boss of you
- We hope to ship week of July 12th. No pickups in Vegas.
- If you don't like this, that's okay, you can chance it at the con. Many of the badges will be given away for various challenges or just randomly. We are looking at remote drops again since some folks will not be attending in person
- The final badge, if you solve the challenge, can and should be integrated into another hacking project. It provides a very useful capability.
Hardware hacking is a passion of ours, we hope you'll learn something
SD cards still suck!
Doc did an amazing job on the artwork yet again (and on short notice).
Special thanks to this year's sponsors: Urbane & Osh Park, let’s celebrate them w00w00!