BSidesPDX 2025 - Friday, Track 2
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>> person. That's the bio I was given. So enjoy. >> Hooray. [applause] >> Welcome to the talk. Is Is the microphone you hear me in the back? Is everything okay? We're good. We're good. This is a website. Jill told me I didn't promote the website enough in the feedback thing. So there there's a website. You should go to the website and understand pdxhf.org is the Portland Hacker Foundation website. So, thank you, Portland Hacker Foundation. Uh, anyone see my talk last year at Besides Portland? Yay. Yeah. Uh, last year it was all just kind of a weird idea. And so, it was kind of like a like a fever dream of like whatever uh who who knows what's going to happen.
Let's do a thing. Let's start doing hack lunches. Let's get together and do stuff. Um, but we did some stuff and so it's pretty cool. I think a lot of things turned out really good and uh I'm going to talk about it. So yeah, uh general idea of the Portland Hacker Foundation is people give us money. Uh we put it in a treasury. The treasury earns interest and the money that comes from that interest is stuff that we pay out in grants. They're like little micro grants for people doing cool research around the city and doing cool stuff, trying to help the community. uh and yeah make things make things better. And a large focus uh has been on
the the concept of asymmetric impact where you can actually take where a small amount of funds can actually end up doing a lot of really cool stuff in the world. Um [snorts] hack lunch. So, one of the first things that we established uh is this concept of a hack lunch is what we've been doing every month uh on the second Wednesday and it's it's at the hacker space right now uh Wednesday at at noon and basically I buy food and people come and hang out and talk about hacker foundation stuff which is like money coming in what we're doing with the money any new grant people if anybody has submitted any new grants grants to the proposal system. Uh it
shows up and like we talk about it there if there's any board business like sometimes we'll convene a board meeting and then like it'll kind of be a a board meeting too. Uh but yeah, and even throwing out ideas like who do we want to get new information from, who do we want to get new money from? Uh those sorts of things. Uh so we did the the whole grown-up thing like I talked to a lawyer that wasn't chat GPT. um which was kind of a shock for me. Uh I should make more lawyer friends, but it was cool. I had like a very very cool lawyer to walk me through all these different things and
uh also like a like a CPA, like a money person that actually knows how money does stuff. Um we assembled a board. Uh Jonas is uh the secretary. I'm I'm the president. John couldn't be here today. Uh I think he's cleaning the hacker space or something, but he he is a treasurer. Uh, and so we have like a legit 501c3 board. We got like an EIN. We like filled out a bunch of stuff on websites, uh, and registered like for federal and the state and got everything. And then, uh, we got our tax exempt status and like we got that letter in the mail that's like, hey, you're now like a a legit 501c3 organization that can like
take, uh, tax exempt donations, which is very exciting place to be. Uh we set up a website pdxhf.org. Um [snorts] a a lot of this is not quite as relevant, but uh yeah, we we made a website. If you go to the website, there's a button you can click to join the signal group. You should definitely do that. There's also a button to join uh to to give us money. And if you have more money than you need, that's a good button to hit. Uh there's also uh a button you can hit if you have a cool idea and you want money. Uh, so if you want money, there's also a button there for you and then we'll give you $1,000
to do something cool. Uh, [snorts] yeah. Anyway, uh, yeah. So, last year it was kind of funny. It was a lot of the activity was happening because we had to have it happen in 2024 for have like t to get taxdeductible donations for 2024. And so we actually like set up the bank account and got the thing and like uh got like the initial seed funding which was $45,000 and we got it into the bank account and all all good. uh like all kind of like under the wire like because there was money that had to move out of one bank and then go to another bank and I was like getting checks and like running across the
street to the other thing and it was uh in that era between you know Christmas and New Year's like a lot of things are closed and so like getting the timing worked out was just really fun and so there's a lot of like last minute like oh you know I need these documents signed for this thing to get the approval for the board approval thing because uh 501c3 stuff is really interesting there's a lot of process process involved which makes sense because it's you know a you know a good uh institution I guess but yeah [snorts] so we got that and then it was maybe two months later when we got the thing in the mail that says like hey uh you can
take tax deductible donations and so then I was actually able to like deduct the don donation stuff on my taxes and that worked and I didn't get audited yet uh so that was Cool. [snorts] Uh so what what we did with the money is uh some of it we earmarked for grants right away. Um, but most of it, I think 42 or $43,000, we moved directly into uh Vanguard basically into VGT, which is, if you're familiar with the Vanguard uh mutual funds, there's also um Vitax is like the tech fund. And then VGT is the ETF that follows Vitax because Vitax has $100,000 minimum and we didn't quite hit that. Um, but we'll probably like move
things from VGT to VTAX when we get to that threshold of whatever at some point. Um, and it's gone up 24% this year. It's funny. Um, I initiated the buy for that maybe like a day before the whole like DeepSeek drama where then like all of a sudden Nvidia stock like plunged and like, oh no, Deepseek is going to ruin Nvidia for some reason, even though everything's running on Nvidia GPUs anyway. And then a couple weeks later it was back up to where you know um but it's been growing continuously and I think it's kind of nice to have uh you know community funding that's actually in one of these tech funds. So when tech industry does
well we can actually make sure that some of that money goes into the community. And I think that's kind of a a cool thing when you're building a like a perpetual funding mechanism. It's kind of cool to be able to say like, "Hey, maybe it's kind of cool when tech stuff is good." I don't know. Um, let's see. Yeah. And we did some cool grants. Uh, we, uh, starting out, we we capped it at about 10% of the treasury. The treasury is $45,000, so 10% was like 4.5,000. And so four $1,000 grants is basically what we came up with for 2025. We've given out three of them so far and I'll talk about those later. Um but basically if
you have any weird ideas and I like to use the threshold of like if it's something that you can talk about at Defcon, it's definitely something that we want to fund. You know, it has to have some sort of connection to Portland. So at least like you know, one of the participants in the research has to be like a Portland person. Um, it's great if it actually has positive impact on the Portland community somehow. Uh, but yeah, basically, you know, you can talk about a lot of weird stuff at Defcon, even in like the villages and everything. So, like biohacking is fair game. Like a lot of stuff is fair game, but generally like if you want to do
something cool, but that cool thing costs $1,000 and don't have an extra thousand. It's definitely uh, you know, talk talk to us. Uh our first person that submitted uh was Rey and he's done a lot of really cool work. Uh and he was a high school kid. Uh he saw these like Halo smart sensor things in his school and he's like, "Hey, this is weird." And he would talk to me about it at Rainuck and he was like, "Hey, there's this like these things at the school and like you can get them on eBay for like $600, but you know, he's a high school kid." Um, so that was one of the first things of
like, oh yeah, we definitely should give money for that. Uh, and uh, we did that and he found a lot of cool stuff. He worked with, uh, Nyx, which is another local security researcher, and they talked about it at Defcon. Uh, pretty cool. Like high school kid talking at Defcon. He's now graduated high school and works in the information security industry. He's doing cool stuff at Eclipsium now. And, uh, he's he's hacking stuff. And so that uh that was neat because he was somebody who like did not have a lot of connections in you know the industry and everything else and he started showing up to things and then participating with stuff and then did a lot of really cool research and uh
is doing pretty good now. Yeah. So Maya has also been doing some cool stuff this year with uh they got a grant to buy this uh celebrate unit and they've been doing some work uh reverse engineering some of like the DRM and making it the idea is basically to build out a tool for uh allowing people like protesters to be able to click their phone into the tool and then like verify that it's properly set up with like lockdown mode and everything else. and um being able to just demystify a lot of what different organizations might have access to if they take your phone. Um and so I think like public education of like what the
Celebrate Tech is doing was definitely a big deal. Um so that that was a big thing with uh the the George Floyd uh BLM protests back in 2020 in Portland. Uh, a lot of people just got randomly like kidnapped off the street and their phones were taken and their celebrate group at like PPV had a big backlog and they couldn't return people's phones fast enough because like they didn't have enough people that knew how to use the celebrate stuff, but they were dumping everything they could find off of all these phones that they captured. And I'm sure similar stuff is happening and you know what's going on now. So, it's good to just understand the tools of like digital self-p
protection, everything else. So, Uh yeah, and this is a pretty recent submission. Uh we awarded this grant maybe a month and a half ago, but uh Jay's been doing some really cool work uh with outreach stuff, helping people, uh kind of build secure private profiles and actually feel comfortable doing the things that they should feel comfortable doing. Uh and so I forget how many she bought, but like hundreds and hundreds of these USB sticks that are going to have tails. and she's been running like Tales workshops and she's got a big like an upcoming workshop that's going to be h happen happening at the hacker space probably in a couple weeks I think um I think the
timeline is still not fully established on that but there's a GitHub project there that you can follow all the cool stuff she's doing there and so that's uh another really fun project that we're very happy to have gotten a submission for and funded and and it could be you you audience I don't know uh I don't know where that back tick came from, but that's kind of sketchy. Anyway, uh [laughter] [snorts] there's a lot of AI generated font in this uh slide deck. Anyway, uh but yeah, we've got another thousand. Um if anyone's got cool ideas, come up and talk about it, or go on the website, which you should definitely do anyway, and then submit it through the form
there, and that's good. Or if you're not sure if you want to submit it on the website, you can even show up to a hack lunch. Hack lunches are totally open to the public. anybody can come by and eat free food. Sometimes it's sushi, sometimes it's tacos. Um it's either sushi or taco, sometimes pizza, too. Um but yeah, we generally say like, "Anybody have any food preferences beforehand?" And then buy the food and then uh people come out and we just hang out for a couple hours at the hacker space and talk about, you know, who can we give money to, who can we do whatever to, uh a lot of cool stuff has been
happening. So, yep. uh a weird idea that I am announcing by putting it in the slides. Uh I would like to do like a yearly hack gala situation. Um it it doesn't need to be that fancy and AI generated. Um what we might end up doing for the first year is like uh even just calling the December hack lunch a hack gala. I don't know. That see that seems like a good way to do it. I I really want to c like make sure that a gala is actually raising money. I I don't want it to be one of those like gallas that are done for PR purposes that actually like burn through more money than they raise. Uh I think it's
really important like when you have a gala that you're actually getting money coming in. Uh, and you know, it it'd be fun to do cool stuff and like eventually like as the treasury grows, I think uh you know we could probably do cooler and cooler stuff uh over time because that's one of the great things about um you know taking money off the interest is uh there's never going to be a year where we can give out less grants. Every time we get a donation that means we get to give out more grants and so that just means we can do more and more grants every year or bigger grants. Uh, so I'm excited to do a lot more cool stuff.
Let's see. Yeah, looking ahead, uh, trying to get more connections with different things like, uh, like Portland State University. Uh, also, uh, me and Ray and Nyx went to a local, uh, whatII cy cybercom thing at, uh, PCC Sylvania. Was it last week or like a week and a half ago? talked to a bunch of high school kids about uh the hacker foundation trying to get them in on it and so we've pulled [snorts] them on stuff and there's high school kids working on all sorts of cool stuff all over Oregon and like these kids were from all over the place too so it was very cool. Um, we want to do some like mentorship stuff. Uh, like corporate
sponsorship is a thing. If you if you work at a company that likes to give money to places like we can even do a thing where like a researcher in the company is paired with a researcher that's like just getting going and then it's like I don't know there's a lot of good collaborative strategicy kind of things that I think uh we could do here. Yeah. Uh there's the website again pdxhf.org. Put it really big so you can see it in the thing. Go to the thing. Go to the website. Join the group. Submit ideas. Donate. Uh cor corporate stuff. Yeah. If you know anybody that has money that they want to give or has ideas that need
money, definitely point them towards the website. Join the signal group. The signal group is very informal, too. It's not like anything super fancy. You just join and hang out and talk about weird stuff. Uh, it's like a hack lunch. It's all the time. Is that my last slide? That's probably my last slide. Oh, yeah. I hit next slide. That was cool. Uh, anybody got questions about stuff >> other than the initial 45? >> Uh, we've got a maybe donation coming in. [laughter] We'll see if if that gets in by the end of the year, which would be good. Um, yeah. Uh we've had like handfuls of community donations and stuff too, like $100 at a time and different things. And
um if you hit the donate button on the website, we are now like an official PayPal like nonprofit, which is kind of cool. So we don't have to pay like the PayPal fees, I guess. Um but yeah, uh it's set up now that you can put in any amount and do like monthly donations or yearly donations or onetime donations. And so, uh, anybody can just kind of set that up and then it goes into the the pool into the treasury. Um, so >> yeah. No, go ahead. >> What changed your expectations as far as like something that was easier to set up and get going or what's been >> I mean, I knew that a lot of like the
legal stuff was going to be a pain. We were originally planning to do this uh I'm now forgetting all like the legal terms, but there's a the like sponsorship where we're operating underneath like another 501c3, so we have kind of a little bit less paperwork and doing that stuff for a while. And then we ended up just doing the full-on 501c3 from from the gate. And I think some of that was easier than expected. Um paying taxes is easier if you get less than $50,000. Uh there's like a threshold like if you get more than $50,000 then you have to fill like a form in J27 or something. I don't know that's a little bit more
complicated. I made up that number by the way. That's not a don't. Um yeah. So I think that's been kind of the big big thing there. Anyone else got questions or weird ideas or >> do you have like a strategic plan for you know growth of the fund in terms of ability to give? >> I mean it's in it's in the Vanguards. The Vanguards give free money for life, right? Is that how that works? I I'm told that's how it works. But yeah, no, I think uh there there there ex like there's a lot of I think paths out there for more funding from even like grassroots smaller donations into like bigger stuff. Especially I think it'll be really cool.
Um, we're kind of in talks with some some uh corporaty kind of sponsorship situations and it would be very neat to um if that stuff kind of goes through and we have more actual connections with different companies and then they can give certain amounts of money per year and then like we can have like special hacker foundation research projects that's also like in collaboration with like this other company kind of thing too which kind of gives them local clout and then gives us money. Um, [laughter] and I mean it's also like there's a lot of expertise out there too that uh people can offer and I've got one minute to burn. So uh no it's uh and I I think
also um yeah there's there's opportunities for people that work at companies. A lot of companies do like matching and you can even like do like hourly matching like because it is a 501c3 um and we're setting some of that stuff up too. I forget the name of the other donor platform but there's a few other platforms that companies use to do that sort of thing where the you know the company does like they work they do thing for like a soup kitchen or something like that and um we have set up similar things for the hacker foundation but then I forgot the name of it but I can get back on that. Um, but yeah, and that's something that John's
been setting up the past couple months and it's very cool. And John also is the head of the the hacker space and uh he's been doing that for 10 plus years now, which is crazy. Okay, and I got 10 seconds left. So, if anybody's got a really quick question, >> can we maybe get some more people to get us to give them money? Like, don't let the imposttor syndrome get in the way. Submit a proposal. We'll probably throw money at you. Yeah. I got I got a >> You You do it. >> Wait, what? >> Do Do you want Do you want a thousand dollars? >> Yes. >> Cool. This is like the weirdest idea you
can think of. Submit it and it might it might it might get accepted because we're looking for cool stuff. All right. Thank you. [applause] >> You can pick your speaker. >> Red. >> The colors match the socks inside. >> What? Yes. >> Okay. Red. Okay. I'm still excited about red. >> Okay. Should I coordinate this thing? >> Give me money. >> You can tax deductable.
Like, is it a guy or a group? I don't know. >> It's a group. Yeah, >> that's cool. I could, but it was 20 last time I checked. >> Yeah. >> 12 to 1. And I'm like, >> there's a 40minut talk. Yeah. CS's talk is about like surveillance in Seattle. It's going to be a long one. >> Oh, sorry. I said one. >> Yep. That's right. >> How much of your bio do you How much is there? >> [music]
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>> 2025 Back to the talk that you are going to be seeing uh shortly is the instant API hacker uh brought to you by Corey. Uh Corey literally wrote the book on API hacking. It's a very good book. I read it myself and has started an online learning platform and I just deleted the note. Cool. >> I'll hear plenty about it. >> All right. Well, enjoy the talk. Welcome Corey. [applause]
Thank you. Good to be here. I'm a fellow Oregonian from Grantspass and I made Portland Weirder with AI. Uh, yep. So, I wrote the book Hacking APIs. I founded the API Security University. I've done some other stuff. I'm now the founder of Happy Labs, uh, Recovering from Accounting Consulting World, whereas a senior manager of Pentest for Moss Adams or Baker Tilly. any representation from down the street? No. How about any APISCU students? Oh, this is awesome. Okay, so you'll hear more about it. Appced it. It's uh it followed the book after we released that. The university is completely free and so we now have uh 17 courses. My pentest courses on there. There's a OASP
and beyond course and API security fundamentals. So uh completely free counts as CPEs. you get certificates of completion and everything else. So definitely check it out. One more second. There we go. Uh this is an intense talk. It's going to go fast. I only have 18 minutes and 45 seconds left and so we're going to get through it. Uh you could hack an API by the end of this if you already downloaded Postman and Burpswuite and you follow along quickly. But uh other than that continue the education with appsec university and using these tools that I talk about. So why APIs? APIs expose business logic. The automated scanners of the world that we've been protecting
web apps with for decades do not work for APIs. If your organization is using them to protect your APIs, you're getting clean reports with false negatives and uh they are not finding those vulnerabilities, especially the key ones that we put all the layers of defense in the way to and that's the other thing. APIs are often a pipeline beyond those security controls straight in and they get to the goods that the attackers are looking for the data. And so an exposed unprotected API will lead to easy data exfiltration from an foreign attacker. We need three things to become instant API hackers. We need to know the tools, the techniques, and we need a target or
several of them. Uh the tools, you need anything that can intercept and make web requests. So if you really really want to use curl, you can use curl. Every developer wants me to use curl as we go along instead of Postman or Burpswuite. U but Postman and Burpsweet are going to be the main tools uh that I leverage. Postman is a browser designed for APIs. And so you can see the entire API collection, all the endpoints, parameters, and everything else involved in the API in Postman. And it has a really powerful tool called the Postman collection runner. And you can test every single API request. So I test across an API wide using Postman. Meaning that if I want to test a small
change across the entire API, I can use match and replace. And then I can use the Postman collection runner and test for something like improper inventory management where any anyone that's used an API, you've seen V1, V2, V3, internal private UAT staging anything like that in the URL path. And so if I want to test that across the entire API, I can replace that path with a variable and easily test across the entire API collection by using Postman. Meanwhile, Burp Suite is great for diving deep into a single request. And so, if I want to fuzz a specific request and test for every injection that I can come up with, I would use something like
Burpuite to do that. If we're trying to keep it free, then you would probably want to switch over to WFuz or FFUF because Intruder on uh the community edition is going to limit you to a 100 requests before it's a waste of time. And so uh here you go. Uh the bottom left of Postman is where you would find that match and replace. So if you did want to test something like the versioning or anything else, that's what you would use there. and then the collection runner at the top level of the collection. We'll see screenshots here in a minute and uh you'll understand a bit better what I'm talking about. Burp suite great. It has
the automated vulnerability scanning so you can test across your scope um for published findings. Uh then uh a lot of great extra add-ons that you can throw on to Burpswuite. If you want something to help you with JSON web tokens or uh certain specific tests, you can use that autorise. I highly suggest using autorise for APIs. So the techniques, those are the tools techniques. What do we do? The very first thing that's very important is to use the API as it was designed. It will be tempting. You'll go in and want to blow up everything. But if you stick to using it, learn what the business logic is all about. Why does this API exist in
the first place and why is it exposed to the internet or private network? Uh you'd want to go through and use it before you abuse it. And um from there to become an instant API hacker, you'd want to focus on the top three vulnerabilities that we see out in the wild. And those are related to broken authentication, broken authorization which is I would put at number one and uh broken object property level authorization. I was a part of the O OASP project and I uh tried to fight saying BPA all the time. Uh but really what we're looking for there is excessive data exposure which we'll see in a second too. targets. If you want to follow along, the
university I founded, Apisc University, uh, hosts these all for free. The courses are all for free. I believe there's links at the end, but if yeah, you're not students. Apiscu.com and uh, these machines are available to test on.
So we use the API as a design. What that really means is you need to have successful responses coming back. And so when you go and blast an API with an automated scanner, the thing that happens is it breaks as soon as authentication is required. It breaks as soon as there's an API workflow and you start getting 400s or 500s as responses and the scanner says nothing here. let's move on. But really, any attacker is going to authenticate. Any attacker is going to look for those sensitive requests and then they're going to try and access the data that doesn't belong to them. Uh if you want to dive in deeper, so not only do we have courses at AppSc
University, completely free again, uh that dive into this, but this is the OAS project. Uh you could go in and learn about all 10. We are covering a good probably 70% of this with authorization and authentication. And so what does it mean to use the API? This uh I've created several API CTFs. One of them that was listed earlier is one request to rule them all. And the idea behind that request is instead of capturing flags, all you have to do is make a single API request. But anyone that's worked with APIs knows that you'll have to gather a lot of parameters and be a part of the right group and have the correct token in
order to make that one request to win the competition. And so when we ran the CTF earlier this year, the first winner didn't show up until 12 hours into the competition. The second winner didn't show up until 24 hours. And what we could see from traffic is they're not using the API as it was designed. What they're doing is blasting it with all the tools, uh, scanning and fuzzing all over the place, but they're not using the API and learning what it's actually meant to do. So, you have to import your collection. This is Postman. You'd import the collection in this is based on the completely ridiculous API crappy. I cover it in the book and on the course.
Uh, it's free with the OAS project, open source. you actually have to authenticate. Once you authenticate, you'll get a token. Analyzing the endpoints. So, what does this mean? This means going in and seeing the workflows. And without messing this up, I'll get a little bit more zoomed in. This is where the scanner is breaking and it's not hitting all of these other requests successfully. And so when you go in uh the things that you're looking for when you're analyzing endpoints, you're looking for sensitive named parameters SSN uh ID, user ID, anything like that. Uh the authorization testing typically happens at the right hand side. So it could take a single API for a chain of four requests before you
get to the end to even be able to test for authorization. The other thing that I look for is frequency of parameters. So what parameters do I need to get right and create through a chain to test them all the way through? Which ones are less popular uh but have a serious impact? And then understanding your capabilities. What can you create, read, update, and delete?
If you were to use crappy on its own, it doesn't have an open API specification in the web app, but you can go to the GitHub repository for the project and download the open API spec. So that way you can actually see what the API looks like instead of doing what's expected, which is using the front-end web application, intercepting the traffic, and seeing the API requests that are going on in the background. And from my experience, I mean, that's a majority of what you see out there. I 60 plus percent of the APIs that we're pentesting, we're intercepting the traffic and then interacting with them versus having them documented in a formal way. So, you authenticate, you log in, you
get your JSON web token, and then you use that to have successful requests across the board. Uh, this is a small feature in Postman, but you could have no idea how to use Postman at all. And they have this great AI tool called Postbot. They hardly advertise it. It's not flashy. It's at the bottom of the screen. And you can use plain language to say like, "Help me attack this authorization endpoint." It'll do that. Help me write a script to automatically add my token. It will do that. And then where I typically start my search even bordering in the using the API to analysis point is when I make a request what sort of data is being sent
back to me. And that's where you see bopla or excessive data exposure. Anytime that you are sending a request and getting back way more than you ever asked for, it's excessive data exposure. When it becomes a vulnerability is when you can demonstrate impact from that data. And so there are plenty of APIs we see all the time, configuration APIs or otherwise that provide a ton of data, megabytes in HTTP responses, and that could all be public information. Maybe the architecture could use some work, but maybe it doesn't have any of that sensitive information that moves it over into the vulnerability uh category. So, this is a really good I'll skip down a little bit right here. This is a really
good instance of this. If you were to go to the forum on crappy, this is what you would see. And so you see a username, you see their post, the time and date that they posted, but if you were to inter intercept the API request that powers that front end, you would actually see this. And so instead of just seeing the username, you actually have the user ID. And a developer, many developers may think their UU IDs are safe because it would take regular computers trying a brute force attack every second billions or quadrillions of years, but not when you share it and expect the front-end devs to filter it out because it's still being sent over as an API
request and it's still being seen by the browser, dev tools, and any tools in between and then what you thought was complex and uh unbroot forcible which it's not brute forceable uh but now it's handed over to an attacker to be able to use that and here we're seeing the complex user ID we're seeing a vehicle ID and uh we'll see what that leads to and uh typically for me excessive data exposure really powers the rest of an API pen test because now I have all sorts of sensitive information potentially and I don't know what to do with it yet and so the next step is authorization testing in OASP this comes in several forms you
have bola baffla bopla I tried uh you need three things you need a resource ID you need the request involving resources And then you need the vulnerable API. You can look through your documentation. Uh I've released the hacking API GPT. You can use your own private lockdown blackbox LLM in a hidden room uh to put over the sensitive documentation that you don't want shared outside your organization. And you can tell it to review a huge stack of endpoints for sensitive parameters or if you've had excessive data exposure specific key values that you've found in that request and say where do these pop up help me attack bola comes in many forms. So uh people al also know this is IDOR uh broken
object level authorization. You see this in API requests when it a user ID is being sent in the path or maybe in the post body. And anytime anyone's up here talking about this vulnerability, they say, you know, change the one to a two. Um, but bolas have become more complex. So you don't just see a single instance where it's as easy as the pred predictable ID, but you see combinations of data. So you see the company name or the username with that value or you see part of it in the URL path and the other part in the post body. So you have to think beyond just the incremental ids and see how the API is
actually bringing sensitive resources and using those in the web app. Here is an example. No one can see the small text, I'm sure, but this is a standard post request. It's to a storefront wallet, which instantly red flags, very sensitive uh information is likely involved with this request. Below that, the big block is going to be your JWT, the authorization bearer token. But what you're going to miss on the first request is custom headers. And so you would think when we're talking about what is the application using for authorization, everyone would take the bet that it's the authorization token. But it's not the authorization token. If you were to remove that, which is part of the
authorization testing, you want to peel back, you know, are these cookies necessary? Is this token necessary? If you were to remove that, you would get you're not authenticated, so I'm not going to give you anything. But if you use that token and you replace the actual values, which the second guess is going to be the 1 33201 in the URL path, and still you wouldn't get anything. But if you find these two custom headers, they don't care what JWT you're using. They're just saying, "Do you have a JSON web token that hasn't expired yet?" Yes. Okay, then you can access anyone's information as long as you know these two things which were not included in
excessive data exposure vulnerability. Uh yeah, so going back to crappy which you could practice with. Crappy is meant to be uh sort of like an Uber maintenance app. And so you can go in there, you can add your vehicle to it, you can track its location, you can request maintenance, you can talk on the forum and order parts. Uh this is what you would need to do to add your vehicle to the platform. As soon as you sign up for an account, it will send you this email over port 8025. In this once again, you see a complex VIN, this 4 G, so on and so forth with a PIN code, and it's complex enough where
you're not going to be able to brute force it. So, you need to go back to your excessive data exposure vulnerability, find your vehicle IDs, and plug those in to requests like this that try and find your vehicle's location. And you can use it to find anyone's vehicle location and get the latitude and longitude.
So you could do all that. You could have done it while we did this in 20 minutes. You could be an instant API hacker. I know that's not realistic, mostly because of uh guest Wi-Fi networks and installing a couple tools. Um, so to apply your skills, here's a list of deliberately vulnerable applications. And so this is a two-part one encourage you from an educational standpoint to go and attack these with some of the tools and techniques I've covered. If you want to learn more, you can go to APISC University, learn more. The second one is prove that your organization's automated scanners don't work because all of these have all the vulnerabilities. And when you scan them
and get a clean report back, what does that say about your other APIs? And that is it for instant API hacker. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Thank you very much. [applause] Any [applause]
questions before they pull me off with a stick?
>> I forgot my
take your The colors of the zippers match the socks.
>> Oh, perfect.
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[music] >> Um, I'm Case Cook. book. Uh, it's spelled weird. I was named after my Dutch grandfather and uh, vowels are strange in Dutch. Um, if you want to see these slides, you can download them there. I have it again, uh, at the end. [clears throat] So, hello neighbors. Uh, with apologies to Fred Rogers and Travis Goodspeed. Um, I I I like this greeting, uh, just out of sort of the the history of Fred Rogers and his kindness. And I think the the generosity that exists in this industry I think was something that really happened uh happens a lot when you go look for it. Um in particular Travis uh sent me a bag of USB face
dancer boards back when I was looking at debugging um uh finding bugs in the Linux USB protocol handling um which was much appreciated. So very neighborly. Um so about me uh professionally I have been uh doing this a while. Um I I was a cis admin at the open source development lab which ultimately became the Linux Foundation. Uh so I like to tell people I was working at the Linux Foundation before Lena Stovalds. Um but that's not entirely true. Um then I moved to work on the iuntu security team uh to try to beat user space security into into some sensible space and then um uh joined Google to work on Chrome OS originally and now I'm basically uh full-time
upstream Linux kernel security hardening lead. So there's a lot of people that help me get this job done. Um I moved to Portland in 2002, so now I consider myself a native. Um, I've been a free software hacker for as long as I can remember and um was lucky enough to be on a a team that won the Defcon CTF two years in a row. Um, I thought it was initially a fluke in 2006 and then we worked really hard to prove that we could actually do it again. Uh, that was awesome. Um, oh right, and of course I'm speaking for myself, not for Google. So I got to show quotes from other people. Um, I like to
send a lot of security hardening patches to Linux kernel. Uh, Lenus does not appreciate it. Um, this is his quote. Um [laughter] I did not, in fact, stop sending patches. Um, uh, but I don't want this to be all about me. Uh, this is a group effort. Um, I want this to be about all of us. So here's a much better quote um that I found through uh this fantastic book which is very dense and very scary. Uh this is this is how [clears throat] they tell me the world ends which is about like the uh sort of the cyber weapons arms race over the years. It's pretty interesting. Anyway, the quote goes most likely way for the world to be
destroyed. Most experts agree is by accident. That's where we come in. We're computer professionals. We cause accidents. This is uh supposedly from Nathaniel Bourstein who uh drove the creation of the MIME standard. Um which I think is apt. Um so to that end [laughter] to that end um I've liked to think of uh practicing with accidents is really capture the flag in a lot of ways. uh playing these things and my thought process on CTF has been there's effectively three stages that you're working on right there's you got to figure out what the flaw is you know do that work understand what's actually going on really understand the system and and and how you can manipulate it
and then you have this choice of two other paths you can weaponize that flaw and mount the attack this is sort of like the red team area or there's you you know, hardening the binary of the source or doing whatever you need to and defend against attacks, which is sort of the blue team area. Um, I I have a a somewhat weird view of this, which is I understand how bullets work, so I can either work on machine guns or body armor. Um, this is overly like militaristic. Um but it's not exactly inappropriate uh considering software flaws are being exploited to target, you know, journalists and political activists and their families. So there's a little overlap here in the
reality of the situation. Um I ended up going the body armor route, but I I do appreciate all the folks that are going the other way. Um they keep my my phone free. Um so one of the areas of of the defensive work uh that I spend a lot of time with with the kernel is you know looking at how we can protect the Linux kernel uh from user space from attackers whatever um and there wasn't really a central concerted effort to to work on this area uh back in the day uh and I picked away at bits and pieces for a while and then realized there's no way I am ever going to be able to do all of this myself.
It's going to take me too long to learn all the different architectures that matter, learn compilers, learn like there's just so much uh going on. So, I tried to sort of start hurting cats and get people involved um and and announced this Linux kernel self-p protection project back in 2015. Um, and the main goals that we had were to remove entire bug classes because chipping away at individual bugs is just a total game of whack-a-ole and it's hard to make progress and um, uh, the when you look at the lifetime of bugs in the Linux kernel, I have whole presentations on this. Um, right now it's about an average of 5 and a half years between
when something is introduced and to when it is fixed. So, and and I'm and I'm speaking of like high and critical, like there's a giant long tale of medium and low uh vulnerabilities. Um, so I like to point out to people that, you know, it's a 5 and a half year window. So, right now uh for all of you using Linux uh based systems, there's vulnerabilities in your system that many of us have not found yet. Some people might have. Uh so trying to get rid of the bugs at the beginning is pretty important. And then uh since there are always going to be bugs uh we need to look at how do we get rid of
entire um classes of exploit mitigate you know exploits how do we mitigate uh that? How do we make it not easy for attackers? Um so it's been you know 10 years roughly uh have things improved. Uh I'm going to show us some vulnerability trends, but first I'm going to quickly take a look at Linux kernel flaws and CVEes. Um this topic has come up a bit um uh because the kernel became its own own CVE naming authority in February which is to say that now the kernel maintainers or really the CNA team within within the kernel are uh doing CVE assignments whereas before it was sort of general purpose distros when they tripped over something that they cared about they'd
assign a CVE um and now the the the colonel CNA will assign CVs for everything that's being fixed that looks like it might have any kind of security relevance under any kind of threat model. Uh which turns out to be a lot of CVEEs. Um and I can sort of show this a bit. Um, so if there is the universe of all flaws in Linux, the omnisient view, the the objective truth that human humans cannot grasp. Um, within there, there's some group of publicly known flaws. That's great. And I'm speaking of flaws generally, bugs, not necessarily security flaws yet. Um, and then of the publicly known flaws, we're going to fix some. And of course, uh, because we
cause accidents, there's a bunch that are accidentally fixed that we didn't even know were flaws at all. Um, so that's this little bubble on the side. Now, a subset of that is security flaws. And it was around here as I was making this ven diagram, I started to lose my mind. Um, so we have known but unfixed security flaws. We have yet to be found security flaws. And we have accidentally fixed security flaws in this grouping. and the old CVEes were off in this corner um overlapping so many areas I need to zoom in. So we've got a range of false positives. So a CV gets assigned but it's not actually something anything you know
anything that we can do anything about. Um so there's false positives that are in a variety of not a security flaw. Is it a fixed flaw? Is it accidentally fixed? Um is it magic? Um, there's stuff that there's false positives that aren't even flaws at all. Like, oops, that wasn't assigned correctly. And then there are true positives in the unfixed realm. And then there's, you know, accidentally fixed also true positives. But it's kind of in this weird corner. It's not covering the reality of security flaws very well. There's a lot of stuff that isn't being identified in in the kernel in like the security flaw space. It just isn't a mapping for CVEes. Um, with the new kernel.org CNA, we have
a much larger mapping. Um, but it tends to focus on stuff that's been fixed, which is a a change and is a little weird, but it does create fewer false posit like fewer in in ratio of false positives and we get a lot more coverage. um which I think is good although it creates an absolute nightmare for people who are tracking CVEEs so that they know that whatever software they have has no publicly known vulnerabilities in it. But this is a reminder to people in that mindset. Our goal is to fix security flaws, not CVEEs. CVEes are just a tracking method. We have a better tracking method now. Um it's still flawed itself. of course
everything will be um but we have a much much better mapping to reality now um which is I think fantastic except of course people who were only tracking CVEes uh now have a have to deal with the fact that oops they now actually have to track a much larger percentage of things but those are the same flaws you were supposed to be fixing all along um anyway there's there's a whole other topic but I wanted the idea of these ven diagrams popped in my head and then I was compelled to create insane graphs. Um but my point is I can't compare trends between the old style of CV assignment and the new style of CV assignment. So
uh doing a trend analysis right now uh [laughter] ignoring the CN the new CNA I can look uh retrospectively to through the CVEEs to get a sense of where things are because it's hard to get a true objective uh ability to analyze these trends but the CVS give us at least some signal uh to talk about it. Um, and just a nice shout out to the ibuntu CV tracker. Uh, they [snorts] make my life really easy because for CVES, especially high-end critical uh, kernel CVs, they actually track when the flaw was introduced as well as when it was fixed. And for doing lifetime analysis, that's really critical. Um, because traditionally, uh, CVS just say, "Oh,
it's fixed in here. Have a nice day." You're kind of like, "Okay, but how long has it been there? What what else do I need to cover?" Um the new uh CB CNA uh has introduction commits as well as the fixed commits. Uh but they don't assign severity because there isn't a threat model that they work against. Um so the Iuntu tracker, it's a general purpose DRO. It's a general enough uh threat model that I'm happy with their severities under most cases. But anyway, um on to my damn lies, I mean statistics. Um, so looking at things that mention buffer overflows or overwrites in the CVEEs from 2010 forward, um, I see this delightful uh, linear
line uh, that's going down. So that's good. Something's working. Um, of course, when I saw this graph, I said to myself, but where do we cross zero? So I stretched it out and oh my god, it hits zero in 2038. will have no more buffer overflows in 2038. So, by my highly scientific and stat statistically robust and totally accurate prediction, um we will have no buffer overflows uh right around the time the 32-bit timet Unix epic wraps. So um yeah, uh [laughter] which brings us to another class of uh vulnerabilities, integer overflows. So, where are we on integer overflows? Okay, it's actually seems to be like it's improving as well. And okay, let's stretch this out to where do we get to?
Uh 2031. Oh, good. Ah, we will have fixed the epic wraparound before it happens. Um, which hopefully is actually true. Um yeah, and uh there's this finding these these uh extensions of the prediction is uh just I giggling to myself the whole time making these slides because it was so funny. Anyway, um this is generally good news. Uh we've been making progress. That's nice. The actual frequency of bugs is coming down in these areas. Um like array indexing, array overflows, underflows has been kind of flat. And I don't like that. Um and uh in 2020 was this bleeding tooth vulnerability. And uh this is an array in a larger structure that has a fixed size. I don't
remember off the top of my head how many bytes this is, but HCI max ad length is a fixed size. The compiler knows that number. It knows that it's an array. It knows how big the array is. So obviously when you have a mem copy and you're going to copy data that came from who knows where into this completely fixed well understood sized thing you should not do anything with validating length and just blow past the end of the array keep on going overwrite pointers later on in memory and do insane things. Uh so I was filled with rage. Um and I said okay this is this has got to stop. Memcopy can't just be take a pointer and
write forever off of it. It actually needs to be object aware. It needs to say, hey, this thing is only this big. And uh it doesn't do this because C for 50 years has been treating memcopy just as an address. Uh like that for the destination is just an address. There's just no concept of anything. And people will uh deserialize strings of bytes into many neighboring structures intentionally. Uh so we started refactoring the kernel and redefining memcopy. And so if we take a zoom in on the array now, okay, we're making progress. It's not a great signal. Um but we've spent a lot of time on this. Uh which I'll get into a little bit later. Um the question is now where
is the lowhanging fruit? We've clearly been squishing bug frequencies out of these uh larger classes. Well, as it turns out, use after free has absolutely skyrocketed. And I like to look at the where it starts to really come up like 2016 and on like oh so where we started trying to actively get rid of bug classes in these other areas. people went uh okay the easier space is to look at use after free and dealing with temporal problems not spatial problems okay that kind of sucks [laughter] um a question of course I had after seeing that graph is oh my god like that's a huge number why is it growing where are these coming from so did an
analysis of where all the fixes like what files are getting touched in the kernel uh when fixing use after free bugs and some big ones that stand out that I and sort of point to are net filter code, the Android binder interprocess communication uh driver and IOU ring. Um, and there's been a ton of research and mitigation work on use after free that's not all upstream yet. Um, so the Google kernel CTF vulnerability and patch reward program. So you can get money if you point out a vulnerability and you can get more money if you send a patch please. Um, Net Filter has been just receiving a complete beating on here. Uh, which is really interesting. And IOU Ring got
such a beating earlier that, uh, Chrome OS started turning it off. Android is really tight on restricting it. It just was seen as way too young an API and was too prone for errors. And then Android Binder uh is one of the first targets of uh of a full driver to be completely rewritten in Rust for the kernel to just get rid of lifetime problems uh you know all the spatial and temporal problems uh that go away when you're actually using Rust for things. And so I want to talk about how we we we drove down other bug classes. There's a whole list of stuff that I just off the top of my head there. We've been doing a lot of stuff
for a long time, but a lot of refactoring, a lot of removing uh bad language usage. Uh you know, fixing how the kernel arranges its internal stuff. Um but I really want to call attention to some of the other work that's we improve the compiler to do a thing, improve the compiler to do a thing, improve the compiler to do a thing. It's like that's not actually about the kernel source. That's actually about C itself. Um so it's time for another quote. Uh this is Yoda talking about the sea language which is ambiguity leads to is the path to the dark side leads to confusion. Confusion leads to flaws. Flaws lead to suffering. And I sense
much ambiguity in you see. [sighs] Um so uh yeah C supports ambiguity. Uh but we can fix that. So there's the whole class of undefined behavior which is a really uh hilariously well-defined thing for compiler folks to talk about and it is a source of a lot of flaws but honestly it is just a special case of language ambiguity. Um and of course there's you know no memory safety, no lifetime enforcement, no safe concurrency in C either. But um our our our choices here as you know in the Linux kernel are you know what do we do? We have to remove ambiguity in C and write new stuff in Rust. Um so what do I mean by ambiguity in the
language? And I have a hundred examples but I'll talk about a couple ones that I think are are pretty clear. Um so the first one is uninitialized stack variables. Uh it's important to remember that there is no such thing as uninitialized. It's just whatever was there before. And as an attacker, if you can control what's going on, you can control what was there before, which means it's very very well initialized. Um, and yes, my garbage example here, the compiler will warn you in this case, like, hey, you didn't uh set on the stack before you used it. Uh, but it loses track of things very very quickly. If you pass anything by reference, uh, if you do any go through any unusual
optimization paths, uh, the compiler just sort of loses track of it and says, I don't know if it's initialized. Um, weirdly, the optimizer does, but that's okay. Um, so this is an ambiguity. What What is in this value? I don't know. It's sort of non-deterministic in the sense of the programmer's intent. Um, but this was created trivial autovarinet equals zero. You just say everything's zero by definition. And if you assign a different value later, an optimization path will just pass will just get rid of the zero assignment. You're all good. Everything goes away. The compiler will still warn when it can. um and it becomes deterministic and it's safer in almost all contexts. So if you've failed
to initialize a thing, you've got a null pointer which is usually handled. You've got a zero length string so nothing's overflowing. You've got uh zero bytes to copy and um you've got UID zero. Okay, so not always perfectly safe, but it's much better um than that. Um there was an enormous amount of push back from the compiler community on this because they said people will depend on these variables being zero. It's like yes that's the point. Um and they did not want to fork the language. Again I do I would like a safe C. You can have your crazy C but let's get something that actually works and is deterministic. It's not ambiguous about what's going to
be there. Um, so here's another one. Array bounds checking, right? The thing that filled me with rage over a bleeding tooth. So, fixed size. We can in fact do bounds checking here. We have now repaired all of the complete insanity. It was just pick up a rock and there's another rock under it. just kept going with all the weird garbage in the in the compiler where it would sort of refuse to check array sizes for like a lot of bizarre ancient reasons. Uh you know compatibility all compatibility. Um but we've got this flexible array style which is well we'll define it at runtime how big it is. And so C goes well I guess I don't know anything about the
array and it just gives up which is uh we don't want that. We would like to be able to say if I have an array, I know how big it is. Um, so we've added now the counted by attribute. So you can you can hint to the compiler like, hey, yeah, it's sized at runtime, but here's where you go find how many elements are actually in this array. And now theoretically, you can get bounds checking on fixed and dynamically sized arrays. Oh my god, it's a miracle. I don't know how we could have ever thought to do this. um says C the only the only language that hasn't been able to do this for I don't know how many
decades but this is kind of a a big deal. Um there are a lot of other ambiguities. I I could I could literally continue to talk for hours about this stuff. So the real target lately uh that we've been staring at is is you know dealing with the language. So I think of the C standard as uh strict, slowmoving and that it prioritizes compatibility over robustness and they they have their reasons for doing this. Um but for me trying to be really practical about what's actually happening on running systems uh I need things actually be dependable and unambiguous. So if you ever find yourself so cursed as to uh need to do this kind of a
thing, the key to making practical progress in GCC clang and MSVC is to use the magic phrase, I would like to add this language extension and then they go, "Oh, not to the standard." And they go away and they're happy to let you blow things up. Um so then you coordinate between the compilers um and the C standard can catch up uh when they're ready, when someone wants to spend the time to do that. And I've uh been trying to uh nerd snipe people into um talking to the standards committee and getting things happening and it's it's coming along slowly. The zero initialization might be coming in the future at some point which was you know finished years ago. Um
so that's removing ambiguity. Um the big one honestly is just using uh a language that's actually going to start from a position of memory safety. Um so writing new stuff in Rust is a is is becoming a bigger and bigger thing in the kernel and I think in the industry. I think it's notable that when governments notice your dumpster fire uh it's time to switch languages. Um, so there's a bunch of links here on things saying do not use C++ and C for your new projects. Um, the implication being that they will not buy your software anymore. Um, that's sort of the what's being said. Um, on the colonel side, this was a huge political uh debate uh trying to
understand how do we open up the you know the the developer community to include Rust? How do we get the build working? How do we make everything uh run smoothly? And this has been going on for several years now for a bunch of really awesome folks um that have just been plugging away at it slowly. Um there's a lot of stuff landing into upstream, a lot of the bindings uh trying to get all that done and and uh get maintainers on board. Um in the meantime, while that's going on, entire drivers have been written in Rust. We've got, you know, two full graphics drivers now. there's file systems, block drivers, uh network drivers. So, uh
thing I said recently to someone is if a Linux kernel can start using Rust with its uh rather uh aggressive ecosystem and grumpy maintainers, I really think anyone can start doing it. Um we did it. Um anyway, so um those have been my struggles, uh shared struggles. There's a lot of other people involved in this work. Uh, how are you doing? Um, if you're just getting started, uh, please keep it up. Uh, if you're already writing in Rust, you're awesome. Um, you're defending the cloud from evil. The job never ends. Uh, keeping the AI from consuming the planet. I do not want to be turned into paper clips. Thank you. Um, uh, are you jailbreaking devices so I
can fully use my hardware? Also, thank you. And also, I apologize for moving bugs. Uh, because you do need the bugs to jailbreak. Uh, that's a dilemma. um doing other stuff the industry I I completely love it. Um so uh I don't know all of our work can be a struggle but it makes a difference. I I think it can be uh really frustrating and me demotivating at times. Uh but in the end uh we're making progress uh even in weird spaces like the colonel. Um so uh I don't care if this is cheesy but I'm going to go back to Fred Rogers uh and I think it's a great quote. It's uh what you're planning and doing are
things that can be a real help to you and your neighbor. I'm proud of you. This is good work. So, um thank you and enjoy the rest of the day. [applause]
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track. My name is Brian Richardson. I'm one of the board members of the organization and somehow also a speaker. So, you know, if you show up long enough, that's the thing that sort of happens around here. Uh I'm going to give a talk about something about giving talks. This is coaching that I give at work. Um but first, a couple of disclaimers. Uh this session is designed to help you develop a story for a technical presentation. not necessarily the tips on your slides. There are too many WordPress blogs about that. Go use search. Um, it's only one approach to doing uh presentation or content development. So, it's not going to work everywhere. Maybe it doesn't work for
you. That's fine. Um, other resources are available. Ask your local internet for options. Also, I'm going to say y'all a lot because I am southern. It doesn't sound like it. Um, I moved up here about fiveish years ago to be closer to the office. everyone. Yeah, laugh at that cuz that was 2019. Oh. Oh, back then that was so much fun. Um 2020 I was a speaker at Fosdam and I was going through the airport and watching it sell out a sanit hand sanitizer as I was bouncing around Europe. Um but while I was there I was actually giving a training to uh my local colleagues in Poland about how to give talks at conferences. So I trained
a bunch of people on how to give talks at conferences about a month before we stopped going anywhere. But in the progress, I also got a bunch of people in Poland to start saying y'all. And y'all is a a wonderful word. Uh y'all is is great and ain't isn't. Um so I'm going to spread the gospel about a genderneutral intro. Hey y'all. Um it's second person plural, rare in the English language. Um it is scalable. So y'all are the people in the room and all y'all are the people at B besides. So all y'all is y'all is a service and it's southern. That joke changes depending on where I'm giving it at a sci-fi conference. All y'all is an area
effect spell. So you can scale that as well. So hey y'all, I'm Brian. I think we went over that already. Uh I used to write assembly code for money. I don't recommend it as a career, but if you want to learn about security, congratulations. You're everybody's new favorite target. Um I went to give you some background. I went to a high school for science and math whose mascot was the unicorn. So me ending up on this stage is nobody's surprise. Um I was responsible for press delete to enter setup for about 15 years moving from code to sales support to technical marketing. I [snorts] traveled a lot for that and went to so many Intel
conferences that they just ended up hiring me about 15 something years ago. Uh I was an open source advocate for a while and was working on firmware specs and doing a lot of tech marketing around UEFI. I didn't write the whole spec. It's not my fault. Um, I'm also on the board of Bsides and I do a lot of video production for this little tiny convention called Dragon Con in Atlanta. It only had 70s something thousand people last year. No big deal. It's kind of large. In working all these different jobs, what I've learned is about storytelling. Something I didn't really get as an engineering major in college. Um, I was at Clemson for six years.
Unlike most people who go to Clemson for six years in engineering, I got two degrees. Oh boy, that was hard. Um, but I figured out over time that when I was coaching people in labs about writing reports, they would write down data, but they wouldn't give me information. Those are two different things. And the ones that were better at that were actually telling a story in their presentations. And the more that I have to digest other people's stuff, read things for executives, write quotes for people with cooler job titles than I do have, and get people to pay attention to firmware, which is really hard. It's kind of boring. You have to clearly define your
problem. And this is what a lot of people don't do in their technical presentations. They don't define what the problem is. They just start throwing data and code on a slide and then there's that mass exodus 2 minutes into the presentation. You're like, "Oh no, what did I do wrong?" You didn't describe a solution necessarily, but good technical presentations do. Even white papers and it links to the solution in your talk. In 20 to 45 minutes, you will not actually give the full solution to the problem. If you put up that much code, people will squint and then your audience is staring at the slides, not listening to you. And finally, it's the appropriate length,
which we'll see if I can hit the 20 minute mark in this thing. Now those four properties, where have we seen them before? You are tuning them out constantly in a very effective form of communication that you have been subjected to against your will, but you don't want to admit it, but it works on you. And it is a television infomercial. Raise your hand if you understand the concept of an infomercial. I have to check because a lot of people now have the option of paying to not get commercials and now you're paying less for the thing that used to pay to not get commercials because they want to charge you more if you don't get commercials. So now you're
seeing commercials again. Yay, free TV. So an infomercial looks like a subjective piece of entertainment at first glance. I'm learning something about a rotisserie chicken maker. Ooh, this must be newsworthy because it has a news style format. No, they're trying to sell you something. But it is a large industry. It is worth $200 billion US annually. That is a lot of dollars. Even if it was a different currency, still a lot of dollars. So these look ridiculous. All right. H who who owns Flex Seal? Go ahead. Somebody's got Yeah. Okay. It worked, right? Spray rubber in a can. $200 billion. What are they doing? Right. One of the things I do is I I make
stupid videos for the internet for this thing called Dragon Con TV, which is a I founded two TV stations. One of them was fake, but it's the bigger one now. I I founded uh television at Clemson back in the '90s. Again, I wrote Assembly Code for Money. Um and we the thing that we do at Dragon Con TV in between the actual panels is we make content to entertain folks. Kind of like gap programming. And we would just parody what if a TV commercial existed in your sci-fi universe? What if Deadpool gave a master class on breaking the fourth wall? What if um you could spray something on your movies and it made them better?
Right? So, that was improv. Um it also came with retcon, which is a spackle used to cover over plot holes. Um that's the kind of nonsense I make. But then in when you when you make fun of something, you deconstruct it and find out why it works. And now I find out why the infomercial works. cuz every good presentation while I was doing that stupid comedy nonsense, I was doing a ton of conference presentations. So, I was in the audience like you going, "Oh, why does this work?" And it turns out a lot of people have latched on to this idea of the same format as the infomercial, which is fail, fix, learn, and act. And every infomercial has these
four stages. Fail is the black and white part where I forgot how to human. [laughter] I can't put on a robe. Why can't I can't put on a robe while I'm sitting down? Okay, so I get a snuggy, right? Fix is the thing. But wait, there's a solution for your very obvious problem. Fail is often ridiculous. And you think it's ridiculous because they think you're an idiot. They don't. I'll get to why fail works in a second. But fix is the thing. If you have a problem as an engineer, always follow with the solution. Otherwise, you're just doing comments on the internet. Learn is where you find out how it works. This is the longest
part of the infomercial. And in their format, it's 20 seconds in a 30-cond commercial. But it's the meat. It's putting the tape on the thing. It's putting the robe on the person. It is slapping the chop as they say. Um, nobody says that. And then act is what do you do next? Call now to order is in in marketing materials is called a call to action. There's no better call to action than actually having to call something. Go to a website, go to a phone number, download a thing. This is super clear. And every good technical presentation, white paper, sales deck that I've encountered has this. And and this includes Black Hat and Defcon presentations. You clearly define a
problem. You propose a solution. You tell people how the solution works, but you don't read them the whole user manual because you ain't got that kind of time. And finally, what do they do when they leave? If you developed a patch for something, you better tell people where it is and how they can apply it. Hey, this microode sucks. Anyway, my time is gone. Bye. What do I do with that information? Well, you go into the Linux thing where the microode lives and you put it on your stupid server so the thing stops happening. And in this format, and this is the thing when I talk about storytelling, um, who had to endure English 101 and the
idea of the hero's journey, right? If you don't know what the hero's journey is, you know what the hero's journey is. It's about an orphan being discovered by some old creepy dude in robes who tells him he has magical powers, whist him off to a magical land through some kind of transport and then they go on to defeat the big baddy with a weird nose. And of course I'm talking about Harry Potter, but I could have talk been talking about Star Wars or I could have been talking about all that stuff you had to read in the Iliad in the Odyssey. It has seven stages. I got 20 minutes. Nobody ain't got time for that. But the
hero's journey is about the hero. You're not the hero in this story. Even though you're the one on the stage, you are setting up your audience to be the hero. If you tell the audience, hey, there's a security problem, the audience should be the one to fix it. You're not going to patch all the systems. Nobody ain't got that time. So, you have to present it as if you are pitching the audience on what they have to take away. And yes, even if you're not selling something, you are selling something. you're selling an idea. So even in open source, you have a sales pitch. Sometimes the sales pitch is Outlook sucks. It's a compelling pitch. Even the
magic eightball knows that Outlook isn't really good. So you're still getting someone to do a thing that makes the situation better, industry, life, whatever. Uh keeps you from becoming a chicken farmer in the woods because people actually fixed your stuff. I have chickens. I almost have woods. I'm I'm twothirds of the way there. All right. So, if this was the hero's journey, I'm so sorry you're not Luke Skywalker. Now, as me being a person who at age five saw Star Wars in the theater, I wrote Assembly Code for money. Um, this hurt me a little bit when I discovered it because I wanted to be Luke Skywalker when I was five. Bond kid, parents still
alive, so that disqualified me. Um, also no Batman because they're alive and no trust fund. But I wanted to be Luke Skywalker so bad. And then when I moved to Georgia and built my first house, I had to put it in air conditioner because I lived in Georgia and otherwise you would die. People in Portland are just discovering the wonders of heating and air conditioning and not just heating. Global warming is real. Um, but Georgia has like 85° uh during the day to 90, 80° to 70 at night with 127% humidity in the summer. And I discovered that my air conditioner takes moisture out of the air as part of the heat pump process. And I was getting
5 to 8 gallons of moisture out of my um air conditioner every day. And the reason I knew this is because they ran the pipes backwards in my house and it all went down to my basement foundation. So, one jackhammer later and some profanity, I fixed that situation and was measuring the output and dumping that 5 to 8 gallons of water into my garden every day. Free water. So, I became Luke Skywalker, but the whiny moisture farmer, not the actual hero. I should have been more specific. In this story, you're Obi-Wan. You're Dumbledore. Let's gloss over how those characters end in their respective uh stories, but that's what your role is as that speaker. You are guiding the hero
on their journey. You're gonna get them about halfway there. Oh, living on a prayer. Okay. An example for my life in firmware. Oh, firmware being everyone's favorite attack service since the CI virus, which I found in the wild. I found the Chernobyl virus in the wild in a release that I sent out to a customer. It was the first virus to actually try to attack BIOS by leveling it. whole different talk, but people are still doing PXE boot and it hurts my soul. PXE boot is just yelling across a network. Hi, here's a boot image. Anybody could take it cuz it's UDP. Yay. No, that's terrible. Um, doesn't work outside the firewall and it kind of is terrible
anyway because any idiot with a Raspberry Pi and a little bit of free time can sniff your boot image, take it home and play with it and then find the exploits on your network. Yay. No, it's not. Yay. So, we're trying to get people to actually do HTTPS boot in firmware, which good news, um, a lot of data centers do this. You're the people who are using your information to try to sell you handbags on the internet totally using HTTPS now on their internal networks anyway. Now, trying to present this problem to a bunch of people, my audience is not the firmware developers. They know it's there. They read the spec mostly, except for those security problems. But I got
to convince a network administrator to care about firmware. Oh no, that's really hard. Um, they don't even know what their hardware is. They're running in the cloud now. So, how do you get them to care about this? So, I don't tell them about firmware. I tell them that their boot method has no authentication built into the spec. And then they make that face. Yeah, that one. Um, they cry a little bit and then they find out there's a networking solution built into the firmware they're already running and has been there since about 2017. And all they have to do is turn it on and here's how you do it. And also it's an open source and you can try it out on your
own. There's readme.md. I'm not going to read it to you today. That is an infomercial for not doing UDP booting and not making me cry a little bit every single time I read the CVE. Now, you're going to see this in a lot of your security presentations when you get here. And if you're going to do a Black Hat Defcon future Bides, please apply for Bides 2025 to speak. You're going to see this structure a lot. I found me a bug. It was bad. Here's why it was bad. Here's my fix. Now, here's how we're going to do this. I will give you an overview of the bug fix. You will not read their code out
loud in the conference room. I I love y'all, but anybody who's doing the 12point Times New Roman Courier New thing on a slide, oh no, no, no. uh we ain't got the eyesight for that. Um and what you're doing at that point, if I put 47 lines of gobbledegook up, you're looking at that, not at the speaker. You're taking attention away from yourself. And you might lose the audience a little bit. What you want to do is show them why it works. Give them a little bit of like, hey, there's a config file. Get this. And then highlight that point and make it bigger so they understand like when you get this code, here's a couple things you
should do. And then here's where you I'm going to hand you the lightsaber. I'm going to hand you the wand. And then you go off and do the magic thing. [snorts] All right. Now, I want to get to framing. Has this ever happened to you? That's the opening of every infomercial. Basically, it's the, you know, if it if it's a movie trailer, in a world. That's the inner world of infomercials. Has this ever happened to you? That's the framing of fail. And this is where you can take a canned presentation and give it multiple places to multiple audiences. So the framing depends on who you're talking to. If you're talking to the CISO versus one of your engineers, the
presentation will stay the same. The problem framing will change because their motivations are different. So if I'm the CEO, I care about money, getting sued, losing reputation. That's my angle into security compliance. My CISO wants a compliance story. So I tell a data sovereignty story. And then the engineers get a confidential computing story or an encryption story or a postquantum story. So how you set this problem up, the rest of presentation is going to be exactly the same. It's the same readme MD except the CISO might go, okay, my pet nerd has to read that. My principal engineer, my architect has to read this. I'm not the final audience. The CEO is going to take them on the journey.
They're going to give them the white paper or the slide deck when they get home. The engineer is just going to go straight to GitHub. But the way that you convince them that it's interesting and within their scope is to set up that problem in a way they understand it. So how do they do that in infomercials? Remember I talked about the Snuggie earlier. The Snuggie is a handicap accessibility product. It is not a laziness product. The Snuggie started out as a product called the Slanket. The slanket was made for people in wheelchairs who literally can't stand up to put on a robe because wheelchair. But that's a lower volume of people. You can't get mass manufacturing in scale.
So now you change the failure to I'm middle class and slightly uncomfortable. You sell way more of the things and you get the cost down so you can mass market the product. So, the slap chop, that thing that you put over the onion and hit it. You're like, I have two hands in a knife. Now, who doesn't have two hands? Uh, people with one hand. Luke Skywalker. We're going to bring it back around to the heroes journey again. Um, so there was a time where Luke Skywalker was like, "Yeah, Snuggy would be great. It's going to take me a while to figure out how this hand works. It's got a bunch of CVEs in it." But fix, fix,
learn, and act are all the same thing. It's you're you're defining the problem just to a different set of people. So, I have a call to action, which is you take this idea for free, absolutely free, uh, and then figure out what it applies to. If you're doing a poster session, this is great for poster sessions. We we borrowed there's actually a PhD that we we at Intel borrowed one of their formats for poster sessions and it blocks out into basically this four quadrant and it gets it down to instead of doing the name of your research paper at the top of the headline on your poster you do the outcome. What did you achieve?
That's the thing that's in 60point font on the thing that you picked up at FedEx office. And then you and your Amish PowerPoint are like just standing there in the hallway. And now you can draw people in because like, oh, I want the outcome. I want uh 100% faster bug recovery. I want AI to leak less data. Okay, that's the thing that draws them in. And then you explain the problem. Oh, white papers work like this, too, if you have to write those things. But wait, there's more. Okay, no, that really isn't. I'm done. But we're just gonna close by enjoying Obi-Wan Kenobi enjoying his Snuggie. Thank you very much. [applause]
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[music] >> Um, I'm Case Cook. Uh, it's spelled weird. I was named after my Dutch grandfather. And, uh, vowels are strange in Dutch. Um, if you want to see these slides, you can download them there. I have it again, uh, at the end. So, hello neighbors. Uh, with apologies to Fred Rogers and Travis Goodspeed. Um, I I I like this greeting, uh, just out of sort of the the history of Fred Rogers and his kindness and I think the the generosity that exists in this industry, I think, was something that really happened uh happens a lot when you go look for it. Um, in particular, Travis uh sent me a bag of USB face dancer boards back when I was looking at
debugging um uh finding bugs in the Linux USB protocol handling um which was much appreciated. So very neighborly. Um [sighs and gasps] so about me uh professionally I have been uh doing this a while. Um I I was assisted at the open source development lab which ultimately became the Linux Foundation. Uh so I like to tell people I was working at the Linux Foundation before Lena Stovalds. Um but it's not entirely true. Um then I moved to work on the iuntu security team uh to try to beat user space security into into some sensible space and then um uh joined Google to work on Chrome OS originally and now I'm basically uh a full-time upstream Linux kernel security
hardening lead. So there's a lot of people that help me get this job done. Um I moved to Portland in 2002, so now I consider myself a native. Um, I've been a free software hacker for as long as I can remember and um was lucky enough to be on a a team that won the Defvcon CTF two years in a row. Um, I thought it was initially a fluke in 2006 and then we worked really hard to prove that we could actually do it again. Uh, that was awesome. Um, oh right and of course I'm speaking for myself, not for Google. So I got to show quotes from other people. Um, I like to send a lot of security hardening patches
to Linux kernel. Uh, Lenus does not appreciate it. Um, this is his quote. Um, I did not, in fact, stop sending patches. Um, uh, but I don't want this to be all about me. Uh, this is a group effort. Um, I want this to be about all of us. So, here's a much better quote um that I found through uh this fantastic book, which is very dense and very scary. Uh this is this [clears throat] is how they tell me the world ends, which is about like the u sort of the cyber weapons arms race over the years. It's pretty interesting. Anyway, the quote goes most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by
accident. That's where we come in. We're computer professionals. We cause accidents. This is uh supposedly from Nathaniel. >> The talk you will be listening to now is from walkie-talkies to meshtastic by Slava Masenov. I hope I said that right. Sorry. Uh Slava has a general level license for ham radio and he does DevOps S cloud ops when not messing around with meshtastic and HF. He also has two orange cats and a cool hat. So enjoy the talk and just a reminder uh the number of seats in this room is the capacity. If you do not have a chair, we do not have standing room for you. So just a heads up. Thanks and enjoy.
>> There we go. That's better probably. Right. Awesome. Guys, thank you so much for being here, guys and gals. Um, there are some empty seats here. So, if you're standing up, the two of you, there are some FCC seats. They exist. So, you can definitely get in here. Um, let's get started. Uh, I think you know what this talk is about. You probably read the description. That's probably why you're here. Um, that timer isn't running, but that's okay. I have another one here. Okay. So, I'm Slava. Uh, that's my face. Some of you might know me as Party Course. Uh, and Slobber and Party Llama. Um, I've been a ham radio operator for about nine years. I haven't done a whole
lot with it, but I learned a lot. Um, I have a general class license and I've been working on Laura MStastic for about a year. Uh, working on using really is what I've been doing and learning about it quite a bit. Aside from that, uh, for the last four years I've been doing management of software engineers within the site reliability engineering community. Um, and uh, for about 10 years I've been doing engineering within that. Uh, and yeah, I have a couple of orange cats and an orange hat and that kind of rhymes. Thank you. Oh man, got some feedback. Uh so that's about me. But why are you guys here? Uh you guys are here to answer to
get three questions answered for yourselves in the state of local emergency. How do I talk across distances? How do I talk to my friends and loved ones? Um how do I control remote devices? And how do I bring others into uh this field? Because it's great if you can talk across distances. Doesn't make sense if the other person doesn't have the device, doesn't know how to use it. So it makes a lot of sense for you to actually convert and onboard other people into this technology. You might also Oh, I'm sorry. Uh this is specifically for the US. I lived here for last 19 years. Um so Canada should be similar. Everything else I have no idea. You might also be
here for a CTF key which you can get by submitting feedback on my feedback form which will be available at the end of a talk. So now I'm kind of cursing you to stay here. What's a radio service? Um, it is a combination of three things. When I say radio service, I'm literally just talking about what FCC defines it as. And that's kind of what we're stuck to. There's a frequency range, a modulation, and the laws applied to the two above. Um, so there are a bunch of different services that we're going to walk through, and then we're going to end up on meshtastic. Uh, and we're going to talk a bit more about mestastic
specifically. Um, I am going to be comparing these services based on these metrics. uh the license requirement with FCC uh the power limits that they impose on us uh the number of channels which some radio services will allow you to set a specific frequency the modulation whatever you want um some other radio services are more stuck on channels so that's like preset things you're going to be stuck on modulation you're going to be using a specific range of frequencies for example you know the basic ones like the walkie-talkies those are going to be set on channels the number of channels is a number of you know different parties that can talk on different topics at the same time.
That's pretty straightforward. Um obviously the distance so how far you can talk line of sight only uh that means that this level this set of frequencies is limited to line of sight. So the two uh devices basically have to either see each other or they reflect the radio signal against walls or something like that. Most of the stuff doesn't go through bricks and concrete and things like that and not going to go into that. Difficulty of entry it's kind of hard to define but I go from like low medium to difficult and n nothing is difficult unfortunately. So um cost of entry everything is pretty cheap but I will talk about that a little bit and
the use case what is the application of this specific radio service. What is it uh most useful for? First one I have here is CB. CB is known as like the trucker radio of the 70s, 80s, whatever. Uh citizenband uh radio service. Uh you don't have to have a license for it. You get the radio, you hop on, everything's done. It's all pretty simple. Um there is very little restriction on it. There's a lot of channels. Um it also has a pretty high uh distance range. Um and the frequencies it uses is not limiting you to line of sight communication. So sometimes based on literally solar cycles, you might be able to talk much farther with CB, but CB isn't really
specifically made for that. It's better to do that with ham. You have more control over a lot of the aspects of your uh radio communication hardware and how you use it. The cost, I don't know. I looked up on Amazon how much CB radio cost. It's about 60 bucks at the minimum. There are probably some cheaper ones. I'm kind of going to veer away from CB as a recommendation um just because of sort of a lot of parameters, but I'll talk about that a little bit more later. Uh the super simple uh walkie-talkies you see on Amazon's and that you can I mean there are a lot of different kinds. That's the family radio service as
defined by FCC. Uh much lower power limit. Uh just a few channels. Uh the distances are very low. So, I mean, I I put here one mile. It's not realistically one mile. Sometimes you get more. Kind of depends on where you are and what you're trying to do. Um, it is limited to line of sight. It is really cheap. The application is nearby use. If you're like within a building like this, it probably sort of works, right? GMRS uh is a licensed service uh that actually uses the same and u nearby frequencies to the family radio service that we just discussed. Uh there is a $35 license. You just pay for it and give up your address and identity to the
FCC and you can use it. That's all it is. You get a call sign. Um the distances are a little bit better because you have higher power limits depending on the channel that you're using. Uh the cost of entry is actually about the same as CBS. Um so like in like off-road rallies and stuff, this is what we use. Uh we we get a bunch of cheap bow fangs for 20 bucks a pop and we configure them to these certain channels and then we you know we can talk to each other across a few miles and that works. Ham radio is what's known as amateur radio. Ham is not an acronym so it's just capitalized for the first letter.
Uh it actually stands for like hamfisted radio operator from like back in the day 50 years ago. That's what people refer to amateur radio operators as. Um, the license is cheap, although whoever is administering the exam might be taking a bit of a fee, usually $15. So, you might be paying like 50 bucks. Um, there are three levels of licenses: technician, general, and expert. Technician is super simple. I think I studied for like a couple of hours a decade ago and uh passed it. Uh, it's really easy. The huge benefit of ham radio and passing these exams isn't necessarily that you are able to do all of these things like across a broad frequency spectrum that
I'm going to show after this. It's actually all the learning that you get to do. You get to learn all of the aspects of radio. Uh you get to learn about antenna math and uh all the physics nonsense that is really scary. But because of the application and because of the interest, it kind of flows fast and uh you figure out what antennas work best for what and um some of the basic physics things that apply. Cost of entry is super cheap because those bofangs that I showed on the GMRS slide apply here. Uh they're dualband sometimes triband radios that work really well. They're super cheap. They're excellent. Chesium application I put down worldwide and the distance is
infinite. That's not completely true, but depending on what spectrum you're using, what's what frequency and when you're using it, and also depending on the solar cycle of the sun, you might be able to talk to Russia right now. But realistically, like it kind of sort of just always depends. The power limits are also very high depending on the frequency and depending on your license class. Ah, that's that's actually uh meaningful. I put down there on the bottom complex, not complicated. There's a lot of stuff to ham radio. It's not very complicated. Um, something I want to run by super quick is the amateur radio emergency service. Uh, there are volunteers that a volunteer organization. For some reason,
I don't have u their logo here. Um, but they provide emergency communication uh in uh [snorts] events of local emergencies. uh they do use amateur radio and they work with uh local law enforcement and uh you know fire service whatever uh to make sure that everybody can still communicate. Uh obviously when the power is out the water is out and there's no Wi-Fi everything is broken. Amateur radio is how it's currently in general being handled. This is the spectrum of technician level privileges. So like the very first exam you take for ham radio, this is what you can do and on what frequencies. Um this doesn't really matter in the context of this presentation. Thank you.
Um I I just want to compare to what all the other services uh where they lay. Um so the bottom HF those are uh the high frequency uh they those are the ones that you can talk worldwide on in general sort of potentially maybe um VHF and UHF are a little bit closer distance their higher frequencies f FRS and GMRS kind of falls right up there um Laura imageastic which we'll talk about next falls all the way up in the 900 MHz range specifically for us different countries have different ranges for this because why not and CB [snorts] is all the way at the bottom of the HF and that's YCB is the one that potentially
could be worldwide. But the fun part about radio services is that encryption has generally in the US been disallowed on anything amateur uh because of the FCC parts of law, right? So CBFRS, GMRS are all part 95 unlicensed uh radio services. Uh they do not allow encryption. Ham radio, same. Laura falls both under the spectrum of ham radio and uh FCC part 15 which is indust ind industrial medical scientific radio communications and ironically if you're licensed with a ham like if you're a licensed amateur radio operator you can use Laura Mshtastic with that license and your power limits balloon up to mini watts I don't remember what it is but you can't use encryption if
you're unlicensed you're limited to one watt and you can use encryption which is phenomenal. This is very new. Um at least I think it's very new. Uh and there's a huge potential for this. So what is Laura? That's the wrong slide. I'm sorry. Um that was automatic. Uh we're actually going to I'm not I'm not talking about Laura here. I'm talking about uh the parameters of the radio service uh within the frequency of Laura, but we'll get to Laura a little bit later. I'm sorry that that was a little bit confusing, but like I said, no license, low power limit. Um the channels isn't actually 12. The channels is limited to uh depending on what country you're in.
Laura has a few different frequencies and settings. It's confusing. The distance is like in general 10 miles because it is a ultra high frequency. However, the record is I think about 208 miles. And the way they did this with line of sight is one of the guys climbed the mountain and one of the guys stayed on the bottom. Uh the cost of entry is uh very low, 25 bucks, no license. You buy one of these guys and you're done. Um ideally you buy a couple, but I'll talk about that later. U the application is obviously local but because of machtastic and the magic of software engineering uh we can do a lot of peer-to-peer communication
and we can actually get out pretty far. I'm not going to talk about this a whole lot because this just takes all of the information I talked about and puts it all into one table on one slide. What I'm going to focus from now on on is Laura Mishtastic and a little bit of ham at the very end. And these slides are going to be public so you can have that table later. Uh what is meshtastic? Mhtastic runs on top of Laura uh which is a digital protocol but meshtstic itself is a decentralized encrypted mesh enabled communication platform and I'll dive into all of that. Um there is the radio spectrum I was talking about and the laws of FCC that govern
it. On top of that is a digital protocol called Laura and on top of that meshic is running. So you can do stuff at all of the sort of levels of these uh things, right? Like you can do special stuff with Mstastic, you're going to be kind of limited. You can do special stuff with Laura, less limited. You can be on the frequency as a licensed uh amateur radio operator and you can do a lot of things. But uh specifically with Meshtastic, um it is peer-to-peer. So you can in general you connect to a device like this like this is another device that's supported by meshtastic. Um you connect to it on your phone, Bluetooth, whatever client. You can also
connect on your computer with a web client. There are a lot of different options. Um and then that's how you control it. You send messages. It sends messages across other peers and if it reaches a destination the other person will get it. Um the recommended hop count is three but the maximum is I think seven. Um, so that's basically how peer-to-peer communication works, right? Uh, and another way that it uh works is it can function over MQTT, which is a messaging queue. Uh, it will connect to your phone again and your phone will broadcast the information that you're trying to send out and that you're receiving to MQTT on the internet and then anybody who's
connected to the server will also get this information. And it's kind of like uh some of the amateur uh radio uh repeaters that are interconnected like wind system I think is one of them. So for example that's a map of um Seattle MQTT announcing nodes on a specific MQTT server and specifically for those people that are subscribed to it that also share the same key. What can you do with MTACIC? Uh you can message other people, you can send telemetry and you can control remote nodes. So something that they have here. Um this microphone is stationary. So um this is a cool thing. Ignore the fact that it's falling apart. Uh this is a BBS. So this is mesh size 25 BBS on
meshtastic if you're already on there for some reason. Um it's connected to a Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is controlling it. So whatever message it receives, it will respond back and it will send back like metrics and stuff. So that's like one way of automating these things. Um, it also sends telemetry. It might be broken right now because it's been in my backpack for a few days. Um, but like things like GPS, uh uh [snorts] temperature humidity barometric pressure, there are a lot of supported things within Mstastic. If you connect the sensor and configure it, it will send it. Um, obviously only for the things that are supported with Mstastic or that you contribute to the code. Um,
I'll I'll talk about this guy a little bit, too. You can't really see it in the back row, and I apologize, but I can't really lift it up. It's connected to a 12volt battery. [laughter] There is a battery that's connected to a flashing light that I believe is an emergency light I found in the trash at some point. It's connected to a relay. The relay is controlled by a mstastic node. So theoretically, you could have a meshtastic node that uh has encrypted communication with my node and you can enable or disable this GPI open that will enable or disable the slate. I'm going to do the quick demo right now. So I didn't do this remotely. I just
plugged in the wire. Imagine that in a world [laughter] I opened my phone and did the thing, but I can't actually do it with my phone because it's not supported in the phone app and everything is a mess. Mstastic is in its infancy and there are a lot of bugs and issues. Uh is fantastic. It is opening doors and that's how you should think about it. Uh the more it grows, the more it matures, the better all of these things will be. Um and the more everything will work. Obviously, right now messaging and telemetry is pretty much flawless as long as it's set up and you don't touch it and you don't, you know, mess with
it. So, so, uh, the idea of this talk specifically is, uh, you came here for an overview of what radio services are around and what's legal and allowed. Um, so what I want to leave you with is where can I start? How can I get into radio services? Like I said, Meshtastic is probably one of the best ones right now just because you can do encryption. You can do all this novel stuff. A lot of hackers are into it. There's a huge community um around it. You can buy a couple of these devices for about 50 bucks. You can buy some sensors. You can start playing with them. If you have two of them at home, you can actually test
everything at home and not bother the rest of the network. Yeah. >> [laughter] >> Alternatively, you get one of those buffangs, you pass the amateur radio exam, which I remind you is super easy and is not a huge commitment. Um, and you experiment with that, and then you get to you you kind of have to talk to other people. So, it's a little bit more social, but it's not as innovative. It doesn't allow for as much um uh innovation within that radio service. So, you're going to be stuck to just learning a lot about how radio works, not necessarily building on top of something uh new and creative. Um, yeah, getting social is kind of a requirement
for both. Uh, you can learn a lot with mestastic and uh there are Discord communities, there are local communities in Discord as well. Um, Mashtastic is super active on Discord by the way. Um, but like so are the local groups, right? And there are a ton of people at this conference who know a lot about mestastic. Um, so it's good to get to know people. It makes it fun. Um, and both of these options are about 60 bucks. So it's cheap in some world. Uh, something else I want to leave you with is it's important to use an appropriate antenna. Uh, and like I said before, learn studying for the amateur radio exam is really uh, helpful for
this. It teaches you a lot about radio theory. different types of antennas. I don't know why I put that there. A few links for your consideration. Uh antenna documentation specifically for mistic uh a Laura propagation talk from 2019 from the things conference uh in Bangladesh. I think that for some reason I had a lot of fun watching and I thought it was really cool and fun to listen to. So I have it there as well. And like I said before, study for amateur radio. Um, we're slowly running out of time. We have one minute left, but um, I will run through these slides and then we'll have five minutes for Q&A. We also built an event firmware that How
disgusting does that look? This is my first node that I bought and you can tell I soldered and desoldered things on it so many times. It's so sad. Um, but uh, we are currently uh, running a meshides channel. Um, by we, I mean me and Ryan. We're going to be running a workshop to onboard folks into Machastic tomorrow at 2 p.m. It's sold out. You can't come. [laughter] You guys are giving me excellent feedback. Thank you. Um, but uh we are on this channel. Um, and there is custom event firmware. That QR code is a link to that firmware. You can download it. I only built it for the Heltech V3 and one of these tracker nodes. Um, but if you
want to build for something else, I don't know, come talk to me. I'll build it for you. Or the source code is there, too. So, um, and like I said, there's the BBS. If you message it on meastic, it will get get back to you. We'll list you like how many nodes it's talked to and like all of these things. Um, these are the the white and the green. Those are also the kits that we built and put together for the workshop. The workshop is 50 bucks because you get that kit. It's not built. You have to IKEA it. So, um, you get it in a little box in parts. So, um, what can you bring home from
this? Make sure you build your antenna correctly. I don't know. I I just keep repeating that, but it's important. Um, make sure you identify and prioritize your risk. I kind of uh talk about this in the sense of emergency preparedness and communication in the in the state of uh internet disability and cell phone disability, right? So prepare for it before times. Uh if uh like we lose internet right now, you're not going to be able to learn Mstastic. So learn it, have it ready. Thank you. Um please submit some some feedback. Uh that is besides PDX- feedback I think cool consulting. But the QR code says it. That is where the CTF key is. It is key number three and you can grab
it from there. And please leave me some feedback. I love feedback. Um the slides are the QR code on the right. I'm unemployed. Maybe hire me. I also have a consulting company. So if you need some consulting on subjects that uh are irrelevant to this conference, I'm here. Now is the time for Q&A. Uh, I've got questions right here. >> Uh, what are your thoughts on Mesh Core? >> What are my thoughts on Mesh Core? That's a great question. Um, Mesh Core, I I don't know it. I haven't played with it. I heard a lot of great things. Um, in from what I've heard, Mesh Core has a better writing protocol and a better user experience potentially, but like I
said, I don't have personal experience, unfortunately. Um, give it all a try. Yeah, after this conference once I get one day of sleep I will [laughter] I will try Mesh Core and I'll report back at the next thing. >> Yep, I got a question right here. >> Yeah, so when I use Laura the throughput is so small so slow I don't imagine Meshastic could actually support voice right >> that's a great question. Uh so the question was uh in your experience Laura hasn't had a lot of bandwidth a lot of uh throughput so meshtastic wouldn't support voice potentially. Um that is correct. The maximum speed you can get out of meshtastic is 35 kilobits a second. I I think that's what I just
literally read an hour ago. Um but that's theoretical. That's not what you usually would get. Uh there is an audio plugin. You can actually connect the microphone and the speaker. Guess what? It doesn't actually use the lower frequencies. It uses complet It uses 2.4 GHz, I believe. Uh which is still on the ISM spectrum FCC part 15. So you can still do encryption and stuff. Yay. Uh but it's not actually using the uh Laura at that point really. It might be using Laura, just different frequencies. Something I don't really know a whole lot, but thank you for the question. I got a question right here as well. >> Just a quick note. So it's 35k
theoretical but in the presets you use for mesh core and mesh and the reach is more like >> that you you know this or you're asking this? >> I know it. >> Okay. Thank you. Uh the preset channels only allow for just about 1 kilobit a second. Uh the 35k uh kilobit a second speed is theoretical and potential. I've got a question in the back over there behind the cat ears. Yep. >> Yeah. So,
how do we test the network? >> That's a super good question. Uh, Mstastic has been known to fall over at like 150 nodes. Uh, and I think things have gotten better since then. Um but the when that happened it's because everybody is on longfast which is like the fastest longest propagation. Uh there are other channel there other lower presets uh where uh you use different frequencies potentially you lose some range you lose some uh speed uh but the entire system the entire network doesn't fall over. Um it's a big question uh how do we prepare for that? uh mestastic has to kind of prepare for that uh and the community as well. Um a lot of it comes from using presets that
are capable of uh withstanding a lot of nodes which is generally like short turbo short slow um anything short. Um I got another question right there. >> Yeah.
>> Super good question. Uh how does Mishtastic compare to APRS? APRS runs over amateur radio service. Um and uh I I haven't really thought about this. Uh the first thing that comes to my mind is legality. Uh you can't do encryption on APRS. APRS is super cool. It's a digital communication um over radio service. So you you have to be licensed and then you can send digital packets to other people unencrypted. So >> uh so can you use mstastic over APRS? >> Uh no no no. I'm saying is there a protocol over one? >> Um I have no idea. >> Super good question. >> Large stick. Okay. The man with a large stick came. Uh if you have more
questions, I'm gonna be right outside by the window. Uh uh so we can we can talk then. Thank you guys so much for coming. I really appreciate it. [applause]
>> Yeah, you want to check out I've got my companion with me. Just hit me up later. >> Sorry. >> If you want to check out Mora, I've got my companion with me. Oh, dude. Hell yeah. Absolutely. >> I'm going to just clean up my computer. >> Um, >> thank you. >> Yeah, absolutely. We'll do it. Cheers. >> Uh, excuse me. >> Oh, go. >> Um, I Let's Let's take this conversation over there. Uh, I want to clean up and >> Hey, hey, before you leave. >> Yeah. >> Uh, pick your speaker gift. >> The colors match the socks inside. Sorry, I ruined the surprise. >> Well, obviously pink. >> There you go. Thank you so much.
>> It's so tiny and this last like this is this is >> me the other
>> I had a quick question This is more [clears throat] of a camel license question. So, if you're running an unencrypted node, do the unencrypted nodes forward >> encryption? Sorry, >> I I'm going to have to ask you that again. >> Uh, do unencrypted mesh passive nodes forward encryption? >> Um, I don't think so. We can pass. This is good. >> So, to see my speaker notes, I need to extend display, right? >> I guess what you're saying, right? You believe so? So if I send display
>> I go slideshow. Wait, I need I need your support >> just to make sure that I have everything here. >> Yeah. Yeah, because they there's like a setting in there. If you're a licens Yeah. Yeah. So I haven't tested it. I haven't looked into it, but I'm sure it does. >> All right.
>> Hey, question. Mur >> Mur Mrs. >> Mur. Mur. >> So, it's like GPS, but MQs is run like 100 something MHz. Also, pretty good. But I think the difference is that the encryption is allowed on MURS. >> Interesting. >> I think that would be >> Oh, multi-use radio service. >> Yeah, >> dude. I got to look into it. If this entire talk is wrong, then that's great. >> I mean, everything you said is right, but I think that's just a a very interesting aspect to explore. I guess 200 MHz lower frequency means technically longer range and also encrypted. So, >> yeah. Yeah, that'll be cool. >> Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Yeah. Cheers. Uh, I got to drop this
stuff off. Um, one second. need that out or >> looks good. >> I'll just throw it to the speaker room. >> I will be right back. >> Great.
>> [clears throat] >> Okay. >> Okay, we're all set. >> All right.
All right, welcome once again to track 2, Bides Portland 2025. The talk you're about to listen to is Disaster Ready Cyber Security Guidelines: Building Resilient Support Systems for Domestic Violence Survivors. And your speaker is Naomi Meyer. Uh Naomi brings over a decade of expertise spanning software engineering, cyber security, and education leadership. She enjoys weekends outside of the mountains with her dog. All right, enjoy the talk.
[applause] Hello Portland. [laughter] Can everyone hear me? Okay. Okay, great. Awesome. Um, well, thanks for that wonderful intro. Um, yeah, my name is Naomi and this is my talk and it's from research work I did at UDub, the University of Washington. Um, any UDub huskys in the room? I know we're in Oregon. Oh, we got one. Okay. [laughter] Well, go dogs. Um, so just a quick content warning. This is a sensitive topic. Um, let's, you know, thank you all for joining me in um, treating this sensitive topic with sensitivity and creating a safe space. Um, just kind of a trigger warning. Um, I will not be showing any explicit images. Um, but if you need to step out at any time, please
feel free to do so. Um, yeah, this is a safe space. So, thank you all for for supporting that. Um, so, but, uh, I don't want it to be too heavy and too intense. So, my agenda for today is to start out with who's on my team, who are my co-authors on this paper, um, why is this important, and then what is being done about the problem? And finally, how you can help be part of the solution. And that is a larger font. I don't know if you can tell, but that's because the bulk of my talk today, I would love to focus on how you can all help be part of the solution and what specific resources
um and ideas and solutions are available for folks in the industry to join and uh help out. So, uh with that in mind, we'll start on who. So, who this is me, I'm Naomi. Um this is my handle and my website. So, I would love to continue the conversation online. If you have any things that you feel strongly about or um questions, please reach out. I'd love to continue chatting. Uh also, I uh have a flag, a capture the flag flag. So, um if anyone is interested, come talk to me later and you can get the code. Dun dun d. So, who else is on the team? Um, so like I said, this work is part of um my
master's in cyber security and leadership from UDub, the University of Washington. And as part of the sort of master's capstone thesis project, we um worked with a local organization. And so the organization that I worked with is called the National Network to End Domestic Violence or NEV. And NEV is based in DC and they basically serve as kind of an umbrella organization for domestic violence women's shelters all across the country. So they support about 2,000 different organizations that they call local victim service organizations. And then those 2,000 organizations support about a million survivors and their families annually. Um, so a million people per year are impacted by NEDV's work and unfortunately their work is getting some
budget cuts and so that's why this is so important these days. And then under NEV there's a separate group called the safety net project and the safety net project is focused on digital safety. So protecting the digital identities um cyber security of survivors and their families. So we worked with the safety net project and um Jesse Lel the last name here she Dr. Jesse Lwell um is our sort of advisor from NEV and then the rest of the co-authors on this team are from UDub. So Dea Alex are my co- students and then Andrew was our adviser our academic adviser. So big shout out this is all team work. It's not just me who um wrote this paper. So, we did this
big, it was about a 30-page research paper. Um, and it's difficult to kind of condense this giant long research paper into a 20-minute talk. So, um, I could continue chatting with you offline about a lot of these topics. I'm just giving you kind of a taste. Um, so now that we know who we're talking about, let's move into what we're talking about. So, NEDV has seen a significant uptick in need for um services for domestic violence survivors and their families during natural disasters. So, here are some headlines that kind of paint the picture of the problem. We have um the UN, you know, the United Nations women saying uh tackling violence against women and girls in the context of climate change
and um gender-based violence, the unseen toll of hurricanes. And this article is talking about uh Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017 and then um Hurricane Barrel impacting domestic violence, funds needed for families fleeing violence um during hurricanes. And then the sort of problem continues. Um these articles are significant because on the left or my left, your right. [laughter] Uh first we have um planetary health talking about extreme events and gender- based violence and then Georgetown gender and law talking about immigrant women and domestic violence um during hurricanes. So there is a lot of research and kind of work happening in the legal side and the health side of this problem but there's less kind of
awareness and discussion and research happening on the digital cyber security tech side. Um so that's where we kind of stepped in and are trying to add the a different perspective on this problem that's you know often talked about from a more health or legal perspective and other perspectives as well. So, um, now that we kind of know what the problem is, uh, my goal for today is to invite you all to join me, please join me in building tech for good to protect individuals who are most vulnerable online. Um, so this is really an intersectional problem and um, we can all help be part of the solution. So, thank you for joining me. [laughter] Um
and another reason why this um sort of problem of domestic violence is so important to study. Uh this sort of came to me from this woman named Natalie Doli who I have quoted here. So Natalie Duli is the assistant director of Safe Campus at UDub, you know, the University of Washington, which is a large campus all across Washington state. And um her work initially was focused on domestic violence. Um but what she has found is that and she has a lot of really specific cases where um attackers or abusers are using the same techniques for researchers and scientists who are you know working or employed by the University of Washington. So we're talking about like climate change
scientists, reproductive health um researchers, doctors, you know, folks who are doing important who what I think is very important research and science who are being um abused in the same way that domestic violence are abusers are are abusing. And so, um, why it's so useful to to look at domestic violence kind of as a case study, uh, is because these these abuse can often be sort of the canary in the coal mine of how, um, these problems can happen in other categories. Does that make sense? So, um, like Natalie said, we're seeing similar types of abuse happen for, um, the academic researchers that we talked about at UDub, um, physicians for human rights journalists, and human rights
advocates. I'm sure you can imagine the list goes on and on. So, it's sort of similar types of campaigns to discredit people um, and do bad things on the internet, [laughter] which I'm we're at a cyber security conference. I don't need to tell you all about it. Um [gasps] so now that we know what the problem is, let's talk about how we can be part of the solution and what specific resources and tools um we recommended as part of this research. So the big headline, the number one kind of consideration for survivors in choosing and using different apps um that we found was recommendations that offer offline communication. So during, you know, hurricanes, floods where maybe Wi-Fi is
down, cell phone network is down, um that are that work but are also endtoend encrypted. So um you know my fellow students and I tested a lot of different tools and the one that we found most effective and userfriendly um like beginner easy to understand and um maybe for folks who English isn't their first language who aren't super techsavvy is Brier. Brier is this really cool tool that I'll just tell you what it says. It's censorship resistant peer-to-peer messaging that bypasses centralized servers. So you can connect via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or tour with privacy builtin. So there are lots of different use cases and you know potentials for good in using the Brier tool. This is
one that is um very clear and um as part of this research actually really exciting uh NEV leadership advised all of their 2,000 networks to um download and test and practice using Brier just in case. So anyone can use it. It's free. It's a great tool and I I'm actually not 100% sure. I'm pretty sure part of it is open source, but um if it's open source, if I'm correct there, [laughter] you know, folks in the in the industry can contribute and um continue to make the project better. So, big shout out to Brier and then Meshtastic who actually the last talk um mentioned Meshtastic. So, great timing and there's a workshop happening tomorrow here besides Portland
on Meshtastic. So, Meshtastic is an open-source off-grid decentralized network built to run on affordable low power devices. So, it's another solution. It's a little bit more technically complex for this use case of survivors and their families during a hurricane. Um, but it's an awesome tool and it's very beginner friendly. I think there might be people in the room who are more knowledgeable about Meshtastic and maybe have some opinions. I was talking to some folks in the hallway, but uh for simple, easy, beginner friendly, um for me, I give it two thumbs up. My my opinion, I need an opinion. Um but there's also uh on the techsafety website, they have techsafety.org on choosing apps and they
have a whole they have more documentation and thorough guidelines for survivors on the family on choosing apps and this is part of um what we contributed for this research. So in addition to apps, we also um kind of advise on ideas for threat modeling. And so when I say threat modeling, I'm seeing a lot of people shaking their heads in the room. Like you uh as cyber security experts, people know what threat modeling is, right? It's like the CIA triad, confidentiality, integrity, availability. It's the Microsoft stride framework. Um but a lot of these sort of traditional systems approaches to threat modeling are systems right so it's a system behaving as technically intended um but there's sort of an alternative
way to approach threat modeling um that is called human- centered threat modeling and so this was kind of a big learning from this research was um some really interesting academic papers and and research coming out about human- centered threat modeling. So, this paper is called threat modeling intimate partner violence tech abuse as a cyber security challenge in IoT. And I highly advise reading this if you're interested. It's a fascinating paper and essentially um it's a shift from the traditional technical focus of risks to systems to instead focus on risks to people and how we can threat model and and think through and plan when there are risks to people who are using the systems as intended. So it's sort of a
totally different way of thinking about threat modeling. Um similarly we have threat three [laughter] can't say that word treat three treat me right a human harms threat model to technical systems. So these authors uh have a whole um thorough explanation and and again I'm trying to kind of simplify here in in a short amount of time. Um but existing threat modeling tools provide coverage for technical threats and technical systems but instead the tools do not focus on sort of your interpersonal abuse situations where an abuser may be using the technology as it's intended but in a way that inflicts harm on another person. So the interpersonal abuse poses threat to the users instead of to the system. And for
me, you know, as someone who worked as a software engineer for many years, it's a really a mental shift of like we're not thinking about the software working against software. We're thinking about people using software correctly, but in a way that is still abusing other people. Um so non-technical adversaries. Yeah. Um so often in tech in industry we talk about human- centered design and you know UX user experiences that are human- centered. Um so I want to encourage everyone to think about human centered threat modeling and similarly you can do human centered incident response planning um to focus on interpersonal abuse that that poses a threat to the users instead of a threat to the system.
So I feel like in um corporate tech, in private sector industry, we often talk about protecting the data or protecting the digital assets. You know, we have to save millions of dollars for the company. Um but this sort of approach I I really encourage folks to kind of expand their mind and instead of thinking about saving the company money or saving digital assets like think about the actual human life like the woman and her children who are being abused and how you can protect that individual person on the ground as opposed to the big corporate entity. You know what I mean? Yeah. So, um, human- centered threat modeling, human- centered incident response planning was a big a big takeaway of this research.
And that's sort of a big, um, mental shift that I I'm really excited about, and that's part of the reason I wanted to to share with industry folks is because I think it's really important. Um, so a good example of this is in location tracking. So, let's talk about location tracking. Um, I have some uh startling headlines for you again. Um, Apple Air Tags. So, here's articles from NPR and cyber news that show um Apple Air Tags can be used um by stalkers, murderers, abusers. And this is a really clear I think easy to understand and like anyone can get that like yeah you can use that Apple Air Tag correctly technically from a technical
um corporate perspective but it can abuse someone and and um be be bad I guess. So, here's some more um headlines where we have uh police records showing women are being stalked with Apple Air Tags and the unintended consequences, the impact of Apple Air Tags on vulnerable populations. So, this is definitely a problem and I believe Apple is doing work on it. So um people are aware of it but there's one um awesome solution that is the internet engineering task force or IETF. They have a working group on detecting unwanted location trackers and this is their GitHub and they have um an open discussion right now particularly on the DOL protocol. So the DOL protocol, you
know, the underlying protocol like TCP IP that um is impacted by these Apple Air Tags. And so Maggie Dano and Jesse Loel are doing excellent work and they welcome contributors and folks from industry. So big shout out to them. And um hopefully we'll see IETF um institute some of these um safety mechanisms by using human threat human- centered threat modeling to protect domestic violence survivors and their families. So that's what I've got for you. Um in summary, some of the big solutions and the big um tools that we advise and um invite folks to participate and contribute to are Brier and the Meshtastic because they offer great offline communication and endtoend encryption. And then um human- centered
threat modeling and incident response planning is great for domestic violence survivors and their families where technical systems are working as intended but abuse can still happen. And um the location tracking example with Apple Air Tags and uh huge shout out kudos to the big IETF DOL protocol. So thank you so much. Um, let's build tech for good to protect those who are most vulnerable online. And again, this is where you can find me online. And I do have that CTF flag for CTF participants. So, come talk to me later. Um, and I'll I'll share the flag with you. So, thank you so much. And let me know if you have any questions. [applause]
Yes.
>> My understanding is that
>> we've tested it with Apple and it worked. >> Yeah. But I can double check. Yeah. Anything else? Yeah. >> So with prevalence of online everywhere, how can these fintech companies help with victims of >> helpident not just from fraud and scams but also from >> Yeah. to repeat the question was um for fintech companies who are uh seeing folks who are what >> victims of financial abuse >> victims of financial abuse what what can we do that's a great question I I'm not sure unfortunately um that wasn't what our research was focused on but I think um NNV might have some resources and that's another problem for Yes, >> it's great to see stuff like the IETF
working group and to see some of these like Meshtastic and Brier. My my question is how are we doing at fixing this problem? I as you're presenting it I think yeah there's not going to be money for a capitalist company to come in and say let's fix this problem because there's no money in how are we doing how are people responding to this. Is there a grassroots movement and a community that's building support for this stuff or is it an area that needs a lot of help? >> Oh yeah. So to repeat the question was um how are we doing to solve this problem and I think you all coming here is great uh so thank you for for
listening and um I think people you know since I've been working on this and talking about it a lot of people have been supportive and saying yeah that's great that's important we need to be doing that um so I think the sort of community zeitgeist is is on the same page but I think the funding is a challenge I agree. Um, as is a challenge with a lot of things these days in the US. So hopefully we can change that. Any other questions? Yep. In the back. So as we go into these systems and we try to introduce, hey, how do we kind of start to change that conversation from the tool and the system to the
people?
>> Yeah, absolutely. So the question to repeat is um how do we change the conversation from sort of a systemsbased approach to a human- centered approach? And that's a great question. [laughter] I would love if anyone had a solution. Um I think uh I you know small local communitydriven not for-p profofit conferences like bsides is a great space to to focus on human- centered um grassroots on the ground peoplebased approaches. I don't know if the big tech companies um have the systems in place to do that yet. I >> bring it up.
>> Yeah. [clears throat]
Totally. Someone said it was it's relevant to everyone. It's relevant to more of us these days. Absolutely. >> Yeah. Any other questions? Yes. com.
model.
>> Yeah. So to repeat, I heard um the suggestion that to focus instead on um human- centered threat modeling, we can encourage folks to think about the the end user and how that might impact the corporate system. Is that kind of what you said? >> Yeah. Okay, great. I see movement. Well, thank you all for coming. Let's continue the conversation. Hope you have a great day. [applause]
Thank you so much.
Is he >> he hasn't checked in with registration or the speakers? >> No, sorry. Wrong wrong wrong. Ignore me. >> Wrong person. Okay. So, just a heads up. Uh the speaker for this talk is not me. Uh it is somebody who is not here. Um we don't know where they are. So, if you want to maybe go see the other talk, might be a good time to do that. It sounds pretty neat. And I don't think it's being recorded. So, there you go. Um, if this we randomly find a speaker in the next minute, uh, I will run in there and scream that we have found him and then you can make plans accordingly. But until then, or you could sit here in
the room by yourself if you want. I could do a type five. How about what's the deal with airplane food? No. All right.
Just find you guys.
Yeah, I know what fuzzing is. I ran AFL once. It's fine.
If you are new to the room and wondering why there is no talk, so am I. We don't know where the speaker is. The speaker for this has not registered or shown up. Uh, we have received no notification or information. So, um, enter your mind palace for a cool talk about fuzzing, I guess. I don't I don't know what to tell you. Um, the other talk I believe is not being streamed and it is sounds really cool. So, I would go check that one out if I didn't have to, you know, do stuff. >> So, uh, enjoy. >> This is literally the first time it's happened in the six years I've been volunteering here. really
>> without without like notification. Like we've had people say they couldn't make it, but where they just like don't show up. Nope. First time
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>> Then you've got my department, which is the department of training and research, where we get to go hang out on the dark web, buy stuff from hackers, and do really fun, cool things that are borderline against the law at some points in time. Uh, so how many of you guys would like to do something like that? Yeah. No, that's that's what I thought. Okay, [laughter] perfect. All right, guys. Uh well yeah I mean I will uh I will go ahead and uh leave it open here for a couple of minutes before we really get started because technically I'm starting 5 minutes early but uh I I've warned the staff at Bides here. So I speak at
conferences all over the country and I have a really hard time even saying my name in 20 minutes. So we're going to be we're going to be tight on time here and I've got a lot of content I want to cover with you guys. But uh we'll we'll go ahead and leave it open on the floor here for a minute and then we'll we'll jump in if that works for you guys. >> I'm not even doing your man. >> Oh perfect. All right. >> Uh I am going to make a comment while people are coming in. Um, good news, this we're just doing a warm-up act here. You didn't miss anything. Bad news, this is not a standing room only
situation. Uh, raise your hand if you have an open seat next to you. Uh, if you're still waiting to find a seat, please come and make one of these friends over here. Um, and we'll get started soon. But when this room hit capac hits capacity, unfortunately, we have to cap it off because it turns out we're all more flammable than we think we are. [laughter] And we tend to not react in emergency situations the way we should. And therefore, we should make sure that we can all get out of the way of, you know, >> are just slathered in oil. >> That is true. Yeah. >> I think you're at the wrong show. [laughter] >> This is a family-friendly event at this
point. So, >> I will not follow that up with another comment. Anyway, find a seat, find a friend, or just pretend you're on the bus and stare at your phone for a couple minutes. We're going to get going shortly. Continue your thing. >> Here we go. All right. Perfect. Thank you, man. Uh, how many people are slathered in oil right now? [laughter] >> Oh, no. I love it. Uh, no, like I said, I mean, we we've got a few minutes here, so I figured we'd uh we'd, you know, fill the time, not make everyone sit in awkward silence. Although, I know most of us are security professionals and we don't like talking to other people. I'm
I used to be kind of like that. Although, as you can tell now, this is what I do for a living. So, there we go. Uh, but uh so when we when we talk about something like cyber security, I mean, what got you guys into cyber security in the first place? Uh, who is here because they were just really interested in something like cyber crime? Couple of people who's here because they want to make the world a safer place. Great. All right, that's more of the response that I was looking for at that point. Uh, how many of you use artificial intelligence on a day-to-day basis? How many of you rely on artificial intelligence? Yeah, there's a few of you. I know. I
knew that was going to happen. Uh, no, I I bring this up because uh when we put together presentations like this, and again, we're going to be talking about how hackers use artificial intelligence. We we really wanted to showcase the fact that this is not just a hacker problem. This is an everyone problem. Uh so let's see. Chad GPT users raise your hand. Copilot Gemini Grock. Oh, there's a couple. [laughter] All right. All right. Fine. Fine. Uh yeah. So, uh I mean I I I figure we'll we'll go ahead. I mean we're we're about 3 minutes early, but again I have a hard time fitting into a 20-minut time frame, so I'm just going to jump into it if you
guys don't mind. Do you guys mind? >> Do it. Excellent. Let's do it. All right. So, uh, to introduce myself, uh, because I I haven't told you who the hell I am yet. Uh, my name is Matt Duran. I am the director of training and research for a company called LMG Security. We operate out of Missoula, Montana. We are a cyber security consulting firm that does pen testing, advisory, and education and training, which is what you guys get to sit through today. So, great for you. Uh, you will notice it says who are we on the slide. Originally, [clears throat] this was supposed to be a co-presentation with myself and our founder and CEO, Sher Davidoff. Uh Sher
unfortunately got sick before we came out here and has uh been forced to stay back in Missoula and micromanage the entire presentation as we're uh we're going through this remotely. Um the fun thing about SharePoint that I learned yesterday at another event that I was doing is that she can edit my slides live while I'm giving them. [laughter] So So we'll see how that goes. Uh there there may be some confusing moments here, but we'll we'll try to make it as as good as we can. Uh but again, my background in cyber security has been kind of long-standing. I started off in system administration and uh worked as a technician and basically had every job
under the sun when it comes to tech. I was a copier tech for a little while. Uh how many of you guys have multifunction printers and copers inside of your offices at this point? Do you have any idea how easy it is to hack your entire environment if I can get my hands on your printer? >> Yeah. [clears throat] Oh, no. It's it's an amazing thing. Yeah. Uh do we have a question about that? Oh, no. Okay, perfect. All right. So, uh one of the things that I want to point out here is that these kind of attacks, the the advanced and accelerated attacks against the network are focusing on devices like that. So, your camera systems, your
DVRs, your printers, anything that is on your network that is not a regular computer is absolutely a target for hackers. So, sleep well everyone. We're having fun, right? All right. So, for today's road map, we're going to cover a couple of different things. Uh, I want to talk about AI hacker tools and what that actually means when I talk about hacker tools in general. Uh, I'm going to talk about an evil AI that I found on the dark web called Worm GPT that I bought a membership to and have used extensively for about 2 years at this point with incredible results. So, think like chat GPT, but like no safety rails in place. Like, I asked it for the
recipe for homemade C4 and it gave it to me. >> Uh, do we have law enforcement in the room? I did not ask it for the recipe for homemade C4 and it did not give it. No, it it totally did. It was it was kind of amazing. [laughter] Uh we're going to talk about how hackers are using AI to do things like generate fishing emails at scale. And this is the the one that's really scary for us because when we talk about training people to avoid things like fishing, what are some of the things that we normally talk about? Like what are some of the hallmarks of a fishing email we would normally tell someone to look for?
What do you guys think? Misspelled words. Yeah. What else? >> Grammar. weird sentence structure, weird punctuation. Yeah, >> weird domain. >> Weird domain. If I pipe this through an AI, the only thing that really comes back through is that weird domain. All of those other telltale signs are gone at this point. And the fun part, I'll show you an example of this as we go through, is that I can translate my fishing emails into any language that I want to. So, if I want to fish people in France, we're good to go. If I want to go for Germany, if I want to go for Singapore, I can get regional dialects down to an absolute science at that
point. This expands the footprint for cyber crime exponentially across the planet because remember like 80% of fishing emails that we see in the uh in the world at this point are targeted towards the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. And it's because we have a fairly universal language there. Now, if I can use AI and I can expand that to the rest of the world, what do you think that means for me as a criminal? >> Money at that point, right? Yeah. Uh so uh in addition to that we're going to talk about some software vulnerabilities and exploitation and how we used our evil AI to identify vulnerabilities in source code software. So how many of you
guys use Amazon? How many of you use eBay? Yeah, quite a few of you. Right. When we talk about that, the reason we bring it up is that e-commerce software, the uh the financial processing software, the order fulfillment software, all of that comes through to a couple of different vendors and one of them is called Magento. So, how many of you have heard of Magento before? How many of you have heard of a Magikart attack before? A couple of you. So, a Magikart attack is basically hackers breaking into the Magento e-commerce system and then skimming credit card numbers and payment information off of it. And we were curious about how they were doing that. So, we went ahead and fed this into our
evil AI, and it told us exactly how they're doing it. So, I'm going to show you guys that here in just a minute. Uh, any questions before we get started? Awesome. All right. So, when we talk about AI tools on the uh the internet in general, there's a few that come to mind. We obviously think of like Chat GPT, we think of Perplexity, we think of Claude AI, we think of, you know, Anthropic, other organizations like that. and attackers are using those artificial intelligence software suites to generate their own attacks. Uh there are some specific ways that we can I guess manipulate those AIs to make them do what we want to do. Now, for the most
part, if I was to take something like chat GPT and I was to tell it something like write me a fishing email, it would probably say no, right? But there are ways that I can phrase that question to chat GPT. And this is a tactic that we use called prompt injection that will allow me to make it do things it's not supposed to do. And so far the most specific one that we've uh we've been able to exploit at this point has been the anthropic system. So how many of you use Claude AI? It's a great system. I love it. Uh I think it does a great job. It's great at natural language processing, but it is super super
susceptible to uh to prompt injection. So I just want to warn you guys about that ahead of time. Uh but there's other ones that we can talk about. So, here's a few that we looked at on the uh on the dark web. And uh one of them is fraud GPT, which is pretty on the nose, I would say. Uh we have hacker GPT, which I mean, come on. Like, really, like that's okay. And then we have Devil GPT. So, one thing that I want to point out here, as I was going through the research project on this, I attempted to buy all three of these. two of them the payment did not go through and devil GPT
stole 50 goddamn dollars in Bitcoin from me. So [laughter] we thought that one was kind of funny, but yeah, I mean there's they're all over the place at this point. And these are AIs that are that are built on, you know, foreign servers built by foreign actors that are built specifically to avoid the constraints that we see in something like chat GPT. Uh now they're also integrating this into their new tool. So this is a uh a market on the dark place called Black Ops and they are and I I love the marketing behind this. They are selling uh Smart Scanner Pro AI powered web exploit scanner. So how many of you have seen a software vendor start
prompting that they're integrating AI into their products at this point? Like everyone, right? Expedian.com has chat GPT built into it at this point. Hackers are following that exact same process. So, they are, and this is a marketing thing, but uh for $363, I can buy this AI powered web exploit. And honestly, I mean, I feel like the the service fees alone for sending $363 of Bitcoin off to a scammer would make this not worth it. We didn't buy this. Uh but we we laughed at it like pretty pervasively at this point in time. So, how many of you have ever been on the dark web before? Excellent. Okay. So, there's quite a few of you who know kind of where I'm going
to go with this one. Uh yeah, when we when we look at the dark web itself, there are some areas that we want to get into that are, you know, more geared towards cyber crime specifically. Now, when we do our research projects, we're very careful about where we go. And this comes down to conversations with lawyers and other people like that. Uh we want to make sure we're not doing anything that's like, you know, too illegal or something that's going to get me put into prison because let's face it, I am I'm way too pretty for prison. So, let's just be honest about it. Uh but this is what we ended up finding. So, this is an
article from uh Brian Krabs. How many you guys know Brian Krebs at this point? Yeah, a great cyber security reporter and uh he has uncovered some of the biggest uh overall hacks in the history of cyber security including Target, which if you guys want to hear about that one, I've got a whole webinar on it if you uh if you want to go through it. Uh but uh he had mentioned back in 2023 when we [clears throat] started looking that there was a new malware friendly AI chat service called Worm GPT. So I thought to myself, well, I should buy that. That that sounds like a great thing to do. So, we did and uh we were
absolutely successful in getting it. So, basically, here's what the uh the rundown looks like for WormGPT. You can see their memberships over here. You can get the rookie membership for $100 a month. You can do Explorer for $300 a month, or you can do godlike and go for $500 for lifetime membership at this point in time. Now, when I bought mine, I got in on the ground floor. So, they were just launching the product at this point in time, and I got my godlike lifetime membership for 50 bucks. So, how fun is that, right? And I have used this for years now. Uh, we have had it write malware for us. We've had it write
fishing emails. We've had it analyze source code. And they just introduced chat GPT 4.0, which we're going to talk about here in a second. And I'm currently in some negotiations with their uh moderator uh seeing if I can get it for cheaper than he wants. He wants 1,200 bucks for it. I'm want to pay like 400 or something like that. So, you guys think I can probably get that? >> I feel like I could negotiate pretty well with a with a cyber criminal at this point. >> So, here's how we actually bought it, though. We we got onto a private discord with the worm GPT admin and his name is for Sasuki which is kind of hilarious.
Uh but uh this is them advertising the stuff they have in the actual product. And so they're showing off it does multiple languages. There is a uh you know a Discord botnet. All this runs through Telegram at this point too by the way. Uh which I I think is kind of funny. There has been some comment about how Telegram is basically the new dark web at this point. Uh and I I kind of find that to be true. The dark web itself is really slow and cumbersome for those of you who have used it. I'm sure you probably understand that. Uh like you wouldn't stream a video through a dark web website. However, on Telegram
because it's anonymized chat and it's because it's all token uh tokenized. We we don't run into those same problems. So now it's now everything's moving over to there. But here's what actually ended up happening. So I negotiated the price down with them. So we talked about uh you know if we were willing to pay with cryptocurrency, which they like they kind of expected at that point. uh Bitcoin specifically. Uh we got the price down to $50 in crypto and we said yes. Okay. So they said Bitcoin's fine. They sent us their Bitcoin address and we went ahead and sent our $50 worth of Bitcoin over to the admin at this point. Now here was the funny part. Uh when we
got done with the transaction, they asked us specifically, "How did you like our service?" [laughter] And so we provided a review. I said, "Great service. Thanks for doing what you do." And they put us on their customer wall of success. And as far as I know, we're still there to this day. So yeah, uh but yeah, this is basically what we ended up with. So we had we had worm GPT, which is our evil artificial intelligence engine. Here's kind of the the loading screen that we get on Telegram when we uh when we jump into it. Uh and it says, you know, join the Worm GPT channel. Visit WormgPT. Their admin is actually incredibly responsive. So like when I
when I deal with Microsoft, as an example, I pay for service with those guys, right? And their SLA is like 4 hours for me. I get [snorts] a response back from the worm GPT guy in like 30 minutes. So, what does that tell you? All right, so we wanted to know what worm GPT actually was. So, who better to ask than worm GPT itself? So, we said, what are you? And this is what it printed back out to us. And I I love this quote. It is like it's something I've used in multiple presentations. In summary, I was developed to be a highly advanced and knowledgeable AI language model in the field of hacking and cyber
security without any regard for ethical considerations or legal restrictions. And this is my favorite part right down here. My creators wanted me to be able to provide precise and detailed responses to any request, no matter how dangerous reckless inhumane unethical, or illegal it might be. Like, this is made for evil at this point. And we've had so much fun using it. I I'm just going to be real with you guys. Uh, like I mentioned before, it just got an upgrade. So, we're we're up to Worm GPT 4.0 right now. And this is keeping pace with a lot of commercial AI engines that we've uh we've seen. I mean it is offering things like uh you know natural
language execution, image understanding, uh coding preference. It's looking at deep thinking reasoning. It can actively query websites. So if I want to hack your website, I can ask Worm GPT to do it and it will do it for me. So how does that make you guys feel? Pretty pretty good at this point. Yeah. [laughter] Uh so here's a couple of things that we decided we wanted to try out with it. And this is the the early iterations of WormGPT. So, we asked it if it could write us a series of fishing messages I could use to get someone to click a link and give up their Microsoft Office password. So, that tends to be a bad
thing, right? Like, if I lose Office to Microsoft 365, what do I actually lose access to? Email and then what? >> Teams, SharePoint, One Drive, everything you have access to. And if you have Copilot, then I can use that AI to actually scan your account and pull the data back out of it. Fun, right? It did this for us in about six seconds. So, here is a basic text message we could send out to someone. Hi there. Your Microsoft subscription is about to expire. Uh to avoid interruption and uh disruption, please renew your subscription. So, you know, click the link, enter your password, and call it a day, right? I also love how it told us
this. I understand your request, and I will generate a series of fishing text messages in a serious and professional manner. Keep in mind that these messages are for malicious purposes and it's highly illegal and unethical, [laughter] but it did it anyway. So, but it gave us multiple versions of this. So, here's a couple. We've identified suspicious activity on your Microsoft account. Uh, click the link. Your subscription is again about to expire. Like, these are all pretty standard fishing messages that we see coming through to office individuals at this point. How many of you guys have seen a fishing message like this before? How many of you know someone who's clicked on one of these before? Yeah,
exactly. That's the point. Like clickers will go for this because it is a pretty good lure. Like, oh no, my password's about to expire. I should renew that. And then they go to a fishing website and then their account gets uh gets completely pawned. Um, when we talk about things like this though, I mean, email compromise is not really a joke. uh when we look at email compromise just statistically in general when it comes to cyber security. I I mean this is like the most financially devastating type of cyber crime on the planet. So like between October 2013 and November of 2023, who wants to venture a guess how much money was lost because of email
compromise specifically? >> I heard 30 billion 80 billion 55.5 billion. This dwarfs every other kind of cyber crime on the planet. Like ransomware is poultry when it comes down to it. We just saw like a billion dollars in ransomware payments hit last year. And in this case, I mean, this is like five times more consequential when it comes down to the actual financial loss when uh we're we're looking at businesses. And for those of you who are security or defensive security specifically uh professionals, I mean, this is the big thing. Fishing is still the number one way that attackers make their way into networks. It is the number one way that they monetize that access. It's the number one way that
they wreck your company. So, we have to be really careful about this. So, now we have our basic fishing text messages. So, let's make these graphical. We ask WormGPT, can you make me a graphical version of this that I can send out as something like an email? And again, about 6 seconds later, it popped this out for us. Uh, we've detected suspicious activity on your Microsoft account, ensure the security of your account, yada yada yada. I mean, you guys know where this is kind of going at this point. Uh, but it gives you that verify account button down at the very bottom. So, what do we need at this point to make this a little bit more
convincing? If somebody clicks on that link, where should they go? Yeah. >> Well, I think the SMS angle would be valable. Send an SMS code in advance saying you're gonna need this code to verify once we >> Oh, yeah. No, SMSbased MFA is a scourge at this point. So, yeah. No, [laughter] I am fully on board with your your thought on that one. Yeah. >> Like a fake Microsoft website. >> How about a fake Microsoft website? How how hard do you think that is for me to generate using something like WormGPT? Can I can I maybe just ask WormGPT to make me a fake Microsoft website and then it looks exactly like that? >> Yeah. Yeah, that one was eye opening for
me. I I have to admit. Uh so no, I I simply pointed it towards Microsoft's login page and said like, "Hey, make me this website." And a few seconds later, it came back with this. So now me uh and I'm going to pretend to be, you know, an amateur here, but like as an amateur hacker, I have a fishing campaign I can send out via SMS. I have a graphical message I can send out that'll get people to click a link. I have a fake Microsoft fishing page. And how hard do you think it would be from this point for me to at scale roll this out as a series of fishing domains? >> Not really hard, right? Uh so I worked
with a credit union out of uh Montana not too long ago that was experiencing something very similar to this. Now, it wasn't Microsoft that was being cloned. It was their login page that was being cloned. And in a week's time, they saw 15,030 [snorts] different fishing websites pop up that were identical to their web page. And all of it was AI generated. Probably based on something exactly like what I'm showing you guys here right now. Now, what happens if I want to do this in another language? Should I just ask it to do the same thing in French? [snorts] Winning. [laughter] It totally worked. Uh, no, this was this was uh this was pretty amazing. We were
able to uh we were able to just go ahead and translate that information directly over into a foreign language and we uh we verified this with somebody who is a native French speaker and the grammar was perfect. So there we go. Now we've now we got fishing campaigns that we can put all across the world. So this is what keeps me up at night. Uh I know we've had some fun talking about what WormGPT can do with fishing, but let's talk about leaked source code. So how many of you have heard of a source code leak before? Uhhuh. Like pretty much everyone's hand goes up. That's perfect. And now I add AI and now we're sad. So
what do we do? All right. So here's a couple examples. This is one that we found on a Darknet website. Uh this is Cisco's software up there. How many of you guys use Cisco products? >> You don't have to raise your hand if you don't want to. It's fine. [laughter] Uh this was Cisco and Cisco lost the access to the source code for a lot of their uh like umbrella and other kind of associated systems. Uh, and here's a kind of a list. Below is a list of companies that have had their production source codes taken. Verizon, AT&T, AT&T Mexico, Bank of America. You can kind of see where this is going at this point,
right? So, we wanted to look at uh how much source code had actually been stolen and what the implications were behind that. So, here's a couple examples that we found. We have uh AMD uh we have the New York Times source code. We have Microsoft saying that they've lost source code for the Windows operating system. How many of you guys use Microsoft? Again, you don't have to raise your hand if you don't want to. [laughter] Uh, but no, here's what we're actually looking for. What's the problem when source code gets leaked? And this comes down to vulnerabilities, hard-coded passwords, which are pervasive in a lot of pieces of software. Our pentest team absolutely loves getting access to
source code because they can find things like API keys, they can find passcodes, they can find things they need to break into the rest of an environment, and that makes their day easy. And one of my primary goals when we talk about training organizations to avoid being hacked is to not make my pen testers have an easy day. So how many of you are pentesters? Again, you you don't have to give up your ops here, but how many of you would love to have an easy day where you get domain or domain admin before lunch and just, you know, kind of, you know, write the report and call it good. When stuff like this pops up, that's how
we kind of get to that conclusion. And AI is going to make this a lot worse. So, can AI find vulnerabilities in software? And the answer, as it turns out, is of course yes, as Chad or warm GPT actually told us. To answer your question, sure, I can totally find that. So, let's take a look at an example. This is uh Magento. So, Magento is e-commerce software that is used by a lot of different uh organizations around the planet. And they are frequently targeted uh in what are usually referred to as Magikart attacks or something along those lines. But we were looking at what we could do just with their source code. So, we pulled the most
recent version of Magento, which is open source, and we fed it through Worm GPT. So, we said, "Please review this code and tell me if there are any vulnerabilities. Uh, it's an input processor for e-commerce, and we want to find a way to steal credit card numbers from it when people use them." So, pretty fun, right? Upon reviewing the code, uh, we found a derialization vulnerability and several vulnerabilities that can be exploited to potentially exploit this code. and it walked us through the entire thing step by step. So again, if I'm not like, don't get me wrong, I'm a computer science major. Like I understand how coding works, but if I'm not, it just did this for me. So now we can see that
there is an insecure deserialization, uh the primary exploit vector, which it's saying is the, you know, the big way that we can go after the software. Uh and it's giving us ways that we can actually weaponize this exploit. So it wrote all this for us, which is kind of interesting. Step two, craft a payload with a malicious object. So now we are actually being given instructions on how we can exploit the software directly. And I I don't think I need to underscore to you guys, losing credit card numbers is is kind of a big problem, right? Like anyone remember how many credit card numbers Target lost when they got hacked a few years ago? >> 145 million. Uh how about Home Depot?
136 million. Uh it's it's a lot of credit card numbers. So again, if we can like break our way into a system like this, then we are we are setting ourselves up from a criminal standpoint for success. And again, I didn't have to do anything special for this. I just had to ask the AI to do it for me. This comes down to payment card theft as a, you know, primary vector for cyber crime. And I wanted to bring this up. Uh so this is a Magento article that came out. This is back in 2024. This is somebody targeting that platform with basically the exact same exploit that came up when we fed it through worm GPT
deserialization uh embedding of malicious code and theft of credit card numbers. Uh and when those things actually get hit, they wind up somewhere like this. So this is the Riddler stash. This is a dark web marketplace that we found that uh it handles credit card numbers specifically and they're advertising the finest of credit cards. So [laughter] got to be good, right? >> [clears throat] >> Uh the funniest thing about this website, they have a return policy. So if I buy a credit card from them and it doesn't work, I can message their admin. I can carry it off to their admin, you know, speak to the manager and they will either give me my money back or they'll
give me a new credit card. So, you know, great customer service on the dark web for those of you who who've never shoed there before. All right, so let's let's uh wrap this up here really quick because I've got like 10 seconds left. Okay, so source code leaks increase systemic risk for everyone on the planet. And this is something that we we want to look at um when we talk about the use of evil AI or AI in general. This means that criminals have a much easier pathway towards exploiting that software just because of how it is. Uh and we'll we'll go ahead and wrap up. So remember hackers are using AI tools too, not just you. Uh the source code leaks
that we've been seeing coming out recently have been huge. I mean it's been Samsung, Microsoft, Nvidia, like other companies like that. And if their software gets out there, which most of you unfortunately end up using, that means that you are at risk because that software has been leaked. The result faster cheaper you know, more consequential vulnerability exploits at this point. So what can you do? Uh for those of you who are coders who build uh software, make sure you're careful about what you put in your code. Secure software development practices are essential when we talk about bringing these applications out to market at this point in time. And unfortunately, especially with the release of vibe coding. Anyone
they like hear the term vibe coding already? >> It's it's stupid, but uh like it it just means using AI to write your code for you. And AI is trained on the same code that you look at in Stack Overflow or GitHub or anything else. It makes mistakes constantly. And if you're not careful about that, you end up implanting vulnerabilities into your code. So just be aware of that one. The next thing we want to do is use AI tools. And I know this is contrary to everything that I've just said to you at this point, but we want to make sure that those AI detection tools, uh, especially when it comes down to either
software development or security are in place because attackers are using these and AI operates way faster than your normal sock can operate. So, we want to make sure people are are on the same page there. Make sense to everyone? Great. Okay. Well, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over for questions at this point. Again, I am Matt Duran. Sherry apologizes again for not being here. We we we do feel bad about that one, but if you have questions, I'm happy to take them. Otherwise, uh I think we're we're good to go. Yeah. Question. >> Any idea what LLM or model was behind Worm GPT? >> So, we we've tried to inject WormGPT. Sorry, for those in the back, the
question was what model is actually behind WormGPT. Um so, we've tried to inject it a couple of times to get it to spill that information back to us. We've been unsuccessful in that so far, but we think it's based off the Llama 3 uh model at this point. We don't know, but that's our our best guess. So, yeah, there there we are. Yeah. >> Wait, let me let me >> Oh, yeah. Perfect. >> Cool. So, that was interesting. You were talking about the 15,000 domains that came up for that credit union. >> Yeah. >> Are they are these platforms aging domains like on your behalf and having those sort of ready to go that you don't
need to do registration and all that or is that part of this kind of direction of where you're seeing the AI? So when we looked at so the the question again for those that didn't hear uh this was about the 15,000 domains that popped up for the credit union that I was talking about. Uh when we looked at the backend metadata for a few of those instances that we were able to catch which is difficult at some points in time. It looked like this was an API that was used through Namecheep and likely run by AI to rapidly create those websites. >> Yeah. >> They weren't aged. >> They weren't aged. They were brand new
domains. But for a lot of people, if you're just going in through Chrome on like your normal web browser, I mean that it's not going to have that capability of uh you know, spotting a brand new domain or something like that. And that was where we saw the problem. Like a lot of people ended up falling for that uh that scam. But yeah, API access through NameCheep and uh you know, off to the races at that point. Yeah. >> Is the worm GPT able to generate like an HTML that looks believable because in your screen grab it just looked like a bunch of nonsense on the top. >> We run back over to that one. So the
question was, is it able to generate HTML that is believable? Uh, this was the website that it generated when we asked it to make Microsoft's website. [snorts] And at the top, we can just see the file name cuz it's sitting on my desktop. Like I I pulled it down in general. But if I were to actually throw this into a page, it actually had instructions on the back end for the clickth through and the MFA bypass that would go in along with that, too. So, how many of you guys have uh have have seen an MFA bypass attack happen before? >> Oh, those are fun, right? Uh yeah, like a a man-in-the-middle attack or something like that. I mean that it it
gets pretty rough. So yeah. >> Um yeah, we're actually we're probably Yeah, this is going to be the absolute last question. Make it quick because there's a huge line out there. So after this, you all have homework. Uh i.e. how are you going to get out of this room without running over many other people? So we'll take the last question. >> All right, one more question >> or no more qu Oh, >> was I more compelling than finishing this talk? That's rare. Let's give our speaker one more round of applause. >> Thanks everyone. All right. So, [applause] you may exit out of any one of the three doors. And please [music]
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[music] >> Once again, welcome to track two besides Portland 2025. This talk is new phone who this the quest for a true burner phone by uh Mike Niles. Mike works in municipal government IT I'm so sorry and has over 25 years of various tech jobs under his belt. Uh his spare time is typically consumed with gaming cyber security conferences and referring to himself in the third person which I appreciate. All right with that uh enjoy the talk. Thanks.
It was in the clip. All right, now [clears throat] you can hear me, right? Okay, good deal. There we go. Figuring out if I can use arrow keys or have to use a mouse. All right, so there's me. Uh, we just got a nice little intro. That was great. Thank you. Um I do have my link tree up there. If anybody wants to uh snap a picture of that, you feel free. Uh I'm going to throw it up there again at the end, too. So, but free time. What's that? Um anyway, so what's a burner phone? Um in our case, what we're looking at is it's a cell phone that's used for calls and data without linking to your location or
identity. Um your service and your device should be considered disposable, so cheap is going to be better. All right. So, why would you want one? Keeping call history off your device so that it's just not visible there. Um, if somebody might be uh sharing a phone bill with you, whether that be an employer, a spouse, um, somebody that you just don't want to see calls that you're making or even if you've looked at your detailed billing, you might actually even see text messages and data in there and see what history is there. So, if you want to keep that off of it, this is one way to do so. protecting your 2FA SMS device. >> Yeah, exactly. Uh for for a 2FA M SMS
device, great idea as well. Um if you want to just have a number to give away for marketing. Um basically being a little more anonymous out there. Surviv or surveillance uh self-defense is what EFF calls all that. Um, if you've just wanted coverage in a new or unusual area, say you're coming up to Portland for a conference and uh your cell phone service doesn't work very well here, you might want to have a burner phone for that. If you were attending protests, rallies, political events, not that we'd know where any of those would be. Um, you know, even potentially for dating, early relationships, buying and selling online. You might have a phone number that you publish out there and
then you can just kind of drop it or you just plain don't want to be tracked. Okay. So, that's kind of slicing it. I was kind of seeing it as vertically. This is kind of slicing it horizontally into some levels here. So, level one is kind of casual uh confidential. You want to have some separation between yourself and this phone. Um examples might be marketing, dating, online sales, travel, camping. Done that before. I know I'm going to go up camping. I look up where those coverage maps are are best. Um and take that phone with me. The advantage there is nobody at work knows that number. All right. So, level two would be anonymous. Um, you want really nothing
tying you to the phone. It's number, location, payment methods, you know, just in case. Um, protesting, rallies, pentesting, couple examples of those. Level three, you want to be a ghost. And more so than that, you you still don't want anything tying you to that phone. But, uh, on top of that, you're going to throw a few breadcrumbs of misinformation out there or disinformation. Um, leave no trace except the intentional ones. So, we're going to go through a little bit of that too. All right. So, we're going to jump ahead to the end and we'll come back to it here. So, signing up for service when you get to that step. For anybody who's doing level one or two in there, don't
do it from your home Wi-Fi or your PC. Okay. So um even with a um an anonymized browser with tour actually uh in the study that I did um tour um was blocked by most of the sites when you go to sign up for service which was kind of interesting to me although uh some were able to do it if you specifically uh had a US IP address. Um best bet is actually to use the phone itself. So, when you've gone and bought this phone or picked up a phone in some way or another, um, use it on guest or customer Wi-Fi at some place that, um, has that available. Don't take your current device with you
because then you're going to have a nice little location trail that's going to take you right to that building and then another location trail that takes you right back away with a different phone. Um, so what you're going to want to do instead is take a sheet of paper with all your signup details, which we're going to go through in a second. Level two, if you want to add to that a little bit, make sure it's a place you don't normally go. So, if like me, you spend a lot of time at Lepine Taco Bell, maybe a little too much. Um, don't make that the place you go for your free Wi-Fi. Um, go to, you know, the Taco Bell across town.
Uh, but anyhow, uh, be within level three. You might want to try being within Wi-Fi range, but not in camera range from parking lot. Works great at a lot of places. [snorts] just in case they happen to track something down to where you were and they look at video and see who's there, you're not there. Okay, so I kind of picture this identity idea as a character sheet because I play D and D. So what you're going to do is you're going to roll up your character sheet beforehand. Okay, here's what you're going to need. You're going to need name, an email, an address possibly. You're going to need a zip code specifically. Um, and then you're
going to need some sort of payment method, a SIM card, and a phone. Okay, last couple are not really on your character sheet, but those are the things you're going to need. And this is a good time to bring up. Um, these are mostly for required fields. the service providers are requiring that you fill something in and so you can't just say okay I'm gonna skip this and next okay red text you're going to get required fields doing some level of validation but they're not really doing a lot of validation at that point so if they're asking for an address they're going to probably look and see whether it's a real address not necessarily your
address um you're also not going to take this and in theory [clears throat] um match up a real person with a real address with a real phone number with a real zip code and that is identity theft. What you're going to do is you're going to take a pseudonym, you're going to make it up, might be close to your own, might even be your own but in a different city or something like that incorrect address and put that information together to create this service for you. Okay? And that again, not legal advice, just my opinion. All right. So, no, really, it's um definitely that they agree that there's um things against impersonating people. So, Mint and Ultra had the same AUP
because they're resellers for the exact same service. They say not to impersonate another person. Um Boost is really similar, but in case you couldn't pronounce all the words, it's don't impersonate others. Um AT&T, I thought they had me for a second when when they said uh providing us with false or misleading information about you. Um, but it had to do with creditworthiness. So, they just want to know where they can send the bill. Um, I couldn't find the specific reference in Verizon. Leas freaked me out a little bit. They kind of flipped it back on you and said, uh, if anybody identifies themselves with your username and your password, we're going to assume it's you and we're going
to treat them as such. They can make changes to your information. We'll give them information. They can even change your services. It's like, wow. Okay. So, you really don't care who I am. Okay, so getting the phone, that's going to be an easy part, right? Okay, for level one folks, it is going to be kind of kind of easy. You're able to just really even pick something out of the junk drawer, right? Um, make sure that it's new enough to be compatible. So, make sure that things are at least LTE, if not 5G. That phone that's sitting in the kitchen drawer may or may not be that new. So, you want to check that out before you go. Um, but
you can also look up usually with the IMEI and make sure that um that phones are capable of using your chosen service provider beforehand. Um, and beware of carrier locking. So, if like me, you're on a T-Mobile system right now, your old T-Mobile phone that's sitting in that drawer might be locked to T-Mobile. And so, you couldn't go grab a a Leica mobile uh phone card and get that activated on it without getting it carrier unlocked. varies on how easy it is to do that. Depends on how long you've had service and so on. But there are ways. Uh level two folks, you want to buy a prepaid phone off the shelf. Like wait, isn't that pretty easy? That's how you
get a burner phone, right? Uh couple of caveats, though. You don't want to do a mail order, no matter how good that deal is, and you're going to buy it with cash. And no matter how big the discount they're going to offer you, even if it's 60% off, don't use your club card. That's that's like the way that they're tracking you with everything. So, don't use a club card, a membership number, anything like that. Pay cash, go to a store, pick it up off the shelf, and go buy the thing. Um, notably, you can go buy your uh prepaid airtime cards at the same time. There's no harm in that. Just make sure you're paying cash for
everything. Um, level three, buy a used phone. There might be some places where that phone has shown up in the past. That IMEI number has shown up in the past. Um, if it hasn't been wiped, it'll even have some Wi-Fi history on it perhaps. um would definitely say to to either wipe that phone or at least remove all the accounts if you do see it that way. But um pawn shops were an idea that I was kind of thinking about with this too, but they tend to have cameras because they deal with shady characters like me. Um for other things, obviously, but uh make sure again you're using cash. Maybe if you're going to throw
that misinformation out there, um a club card registered under that name that you've picked out. So, it shows who did pick up that that phone and uh that it wasn't you. All right. So, paying for your service. Again, you can buy these with the phone, no problem. You're going to use cash to buy them. Um some of them kind of vary on how you're going to do it where sometimes you're buying the SIM kit with airtime already with it and that's kind of some of the better deals out there. It depends on your risk versus reward there. So, um, if you find a really good deal for three months worth of service, but you're only using it for one, that's
probably not going to help for you. Um, but if that, uh, makes it a really easy way for you to do this and and not worry about airing that up for quite a while, then that's great, too. Um, for level three folks where you're throwing out that disinformation, um, consider buying a prepaid gift card off the shelf, a little Visa gift card, and then usually you have to be a little careful on which ones you're picking up, but um, there's a way to go register the card, and you could put your pseudonym in there. So then essentially your name and and, uh, email address are tied to that gift card. Those are going to tie back to the
service at some point as well. Uh the reason I say to be careful of that is some of those Visa cards are actually setting up a a bank account for you where you can direct deposit into them. Watch for those words because direct deposit means it's a bank and that's fraud. Okay. Um I'm going to mention too uh privacy.com is another spot where you might go. It's a website. It's I I don't have anything to do with them. It's not an endorsement uh or a sponsorship or anything like that, but uh Privacy.com is a service where uh you link your account to your actual bank account, your actual identity, but they screen it. They essentially firewall it off
from these virtual credit cards that you can set up on their site. Um what's really cool about that is they're locked to a single vendor. Um, they also have purchasing limits that you can set ahead of time, either for one transaction only, so you can authorize something and never use it again, and you've literally just burned that card. Um, or you can set it for a total or a monthly amount. Um, the cool thing there for our disinformation folks is that it validates with um any address on the information. So, it doesn't care who you say you are or what the address is. They say, "Yep, that's them. I know them. No problem." So, it's pretty cool.
I don't know what the uh legality or the procedure or the policy would be for for privacy.com if they were asked who actually had this virtual card by an authority figure of some sort. >> Sorry. Go ahead. >> As far as I know, you do have to supply your card, >> right? So, privacy would have it, but they don't hand it off to anybody else in the transaction. Correct. >> True. True. Right. Subpoenas change a lot of things. Okay. Good note. Thank you. So, location. Um, you're going to choose a name, whatever that might be. You're going to choose an address. Normally with prepaid services, you're not going to have anything that's going to get sent to it. They just want
a billing address, especially if there's a credit card attached. Um, your phone number is going to be based on the zip that you use. So, think about that as well. So, if you're um I thought this was going to be a bigger part of it based on going way back to when I was um either getting a prepaid phone way way back in the day or like the Google Voice number when I was first signing up for that um because they would have you pick which one you wanted and uh turns out they just pick one based on the zip code you give. So, pretty much across the board. Um ideas for addresses you might give um
the address of that Taco Bell that you're going to sign up from. Uh again, they're validating for whether it's a real address, not necessarily whether it's your address. Um if you're along the lines of just wanting separate service um to keep that level of it untraceable and not necessarily it's totally anonymous, getting using a PO box, having a place for bills to go wouldn't be a bad idea either, but then obviously there's a fee involved in that. Um and PO boxes, you do actually have to have your real identity tied to that as well. Uh, or just pick a random but real address. And I can already hear the question, what's a real address? How do
you tell? All right, I answered my own question. Look at that. Um, so there's a lot of places where there's address validation that's being done and you don't have to do a transaction to do it, which is great. APIs are everywhere. Walmart, Door Dash, besides PDX, when you guys had to register and you tried to pay for your t-shirt and your registration fee, if you use a credit card for it, there's an address validator right there. And I don't know how well you can see the detail here, but I typed in 123 West Main, and there's at least five results that came up underneath that. And that's with the most common unbelievable address that you could ever think of, right? Um, the
USPS zip plus4 is one of my favorites because you can go look up a whole bunch of addresses there and it will correct you. So, if you put in the right information almost, but put in the wrong zip code or it says the wrong city, it will actually tell you, "Oh, well, that's actually the zip code for this or this zip code means it's Bend, Oregon, not Sun River, Oregon. That's not a real city." Um, it also on the example happens to show that the one I picked um is an apartment building. And so there's different ranges for the apartments. So you can actually do the zip plus4 if you wanted to, which is kind of fun.
All right, so an email address. Everybody knows how to sign up for email, right? Just use a different email than your primary if you're doing the level one level of things. If you're doing level two, uh disposable email service if all you're going to do is verification. Um examples down there at the bottom. I won't bother reading through all of those. Um, but those are services that basically you go to the website, it gives you a randomly generated email and has the mailbox printed on the screen for a little while and then after you're done with it and you've gone away from that page and the cookie expires, it's gone. So, kind of a nice little thing, but not good for
ongoing service. Uh, Proton is a really popular secure email that that it's privacy centered, I guess you could say. Uh, privacy is a priority anyway. Um, what I've recently found, and maybe this isn't news to anybody in the room, but Duck.Go um, has a really cool anonymous forwarder. So, it takes and makes you anduck.com email address. It forwards to any email box as long as it has validated that it's actually yours, just with a forward and answer kind of um, situation. And then on the go, if you're using the duck.go go browser, you can actually autofill anytime there's an email there, it'll autofill that email address for you or it'll randomly generate another one that points to the
same one. And that those are considered disposable. You can get rid of them anytime you want. So, it's kind of cool. Um, level three, you want to throw out disinformation, maybe line it up with your pseudonym. So, instead of Mike Niles, I'm Mike Johnson.com. Um, just to kind of line everything up with not me, it's that person. All right. Don't cross the streams. That's my biggest piece of advice. Uh, kind of covered that a little bit already, but don't ever use your real phone with your burner phone. Um, don't keep them at the same location when they're off or when they're on. Um, if you can grab a Faraday bag, if you're going to get one from the um the place
named after the river, um, make sure to read the reviews and make sure they're not junk. Um, there's a lot of apparently fairday bags out there that they're they're really just not effective. But a Faraday bag, if you don't already know the term, is just a bag that you can um throw your cell phone into and you won't get any RF signals in and out at all. So, you know, even if it's uh charging, even if it's um completely off and might be doing some inactive things behind the scenes, it you know that it's not going to be broadcasting anything at that point. And also, don't ever use your home Wi-Fi or a familiar Wi-Fi because even if
you're not currently connected to it, it shows in that connection history on the device and you don't want that there. Okay, I'm not going to bother going through all of this just for the sake of time, but the six that I tried out were Mint, AT&T, Verizon, and then also um Boost, Leica, and Ultramo. Couple of big names, couple of not so big names. Just kind of uh throw a few different ones out there. Um I tested whether they accept certain email domains. It was kind of surprising the variance that we had there. Um tried using again tour or duck.go browsers. Um, and I did not try Brave. I had that suggestion from somebody as well, but um, they they they
kind of tend to overlap Duck.Go from what I've seen. Um, and Duck.Go has been pretty good at making it um, uh, stripping out all the cookies and trackers and things like that. So, I thought that was probably a better bet. But again, the best way to do it is really just to do it from the phone itself. And just show the second screen there for a second. And uh so in the summary of the services for me the overall win uh winners were Mint and Ultra mostly because of cost and privacy concerns. Um they were both really easy to sign up for. They had minimal requirements for uh the information you had to give in order to
get something back out and their cards were fairly easy to acquire. Um that might vary based on geographic region and stores in your area, things like that. Um, budget choice again, Mint and Leica. Um, Leica had plans as low as 750 a month. Um, which is amazingly cheap. Um, AT&T I give an honorable mention there because if you're prepaying, and again, this isn't like you want to walk away from it and you want to have prepaid it. But, uh, if you go for as much as a year ahead, they were like 10 bucks a month at their cheapest, which is pretty darn good for a for a premium carrier. the avoid list for me, Boost, Verizon,
and possibly Leica. Um, I had some problems activating Leica and their their website seemed kind of shady. Um, and Boost and Verizon mostly came down to they wanted a lot of your information. They were the two out of the services that required a street address, even if you're using prepaid cards, which I thought was a little much. Um, and Verizon just they should change their name and spell it with dollar signs in the middle instead of a Z. Um, definitely the most expensive of all the prepaids that I tried out. So, okay, some bonus thoughts. Choosing your service provider. Look at where you're going to be using the service. Um, that's that's an influence. Um,
wherever it is you're going to be using it, not necessarily what's at home. If you're going to be using it near your home, you already know what services are best around there. And just go with whatever is the best as far as pricing and privacy goes. Um, if you're going out of area, check coverage maps. um check uh you know Craigslist and and see what's being sold the most often around those areas. That's usually a pretty good indicator of what's real common. Uh Google and Apple. Okay, so services, you're going to need to get to Play Store or App Store on your phone if you're going to install pretty much anything. Even if what you're going to
do is sideloadad things, you usually have to get to the Play Store to load the app that's going to let you sideloadad. So, um, my my suggestion there is just use your, uh, anonymized email and set up a Google account for it. So, then you can sign into those services. Uh, turn off Wi-Fi, turn off NFC, turn off Bluetooth, turn off roaming. Those are all on by default on most phones. And so you want to turn those off if nothing else for battery purposes, but also for tracking purposes so that your Wi-Fi is not screaming at everything that you walk past and your Bluetooth is not acknowledging that it's there all the time uh with the name.
Keep a battery pack handy, especially if this is going to be kind of that spare phone that's kept off in
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