DEFCON: The Documentary Page #9

stuff that I think up throughout the year and then

I put it together, and try to make

it a coherent flowing contest

to the best of my ability.

We're inside the Lockpick Village at DEF CON 20, and this is where we

teach people how to pick locks for entertainment and sport reasons.

Most technical people seem to have a

rather strange curiosity about how

things work, and one of the things that

lead us into that is how locks work.

We can teach most people within five or ten

minutes how to start picking locks, and

then some of them will stay in here and at

the end of the day we throw them out, and

they'll say, "Oh, I didn't go to the talks I was supposed

to.", because they'd been sitting in here picking

locks all day long.

Most DEF CON talks start with a great deal of alcohol and

end with a great deal of alcohol, at least the good ones

I've noticed.

The aircraft tracking stuff came out

of the fact that I bought an app

for a couple bucks that let me point my cell phone

at the contrail and look at the information

for that particular flight was overlaid on the camera.

As I started digging, I found more and more issues.

Just, you know, out of my own curiosity, I thought "How does this work?".

I found all these issues, and it got really scary because,

I speak a lot, and I go to a whole bunch of conferences.

You know, this stuff can start

getting really dangerous, so I was thinking, "Even if I

don't have all the answers, I need to get this answer out."

Really, I've done enough of these

things and know the crowd that

I don't get jitters or nerves

or anything like that.

It's the sort of thing that I'm running through some of the

slides in my talk, some of the jokes I may have constructed.

For a particular slide

or a particular moment.

But mostly, it's just "OK, does my laptop work?

Are the slides up?"

Does the projector work?

Yep. OK. All good."

Thank you.

So, generally what I say is that

when I get bored, bad things happen.

At the Las Vegas Airport here, you've

got a flight landing every 90 seconds.

That's an awful lot of metal, money and

people moving around. How does this all

work? How does this all fit together? You

always hear about air traffic control,

but does anybody really

know how it works anymore?

I think that the audience is

looking to learn something new.

They're looking for an entertaining discussion

on interesting technologies that at the

end of the day are kind of important.

So increasingly my talks have gone into Why

is the Internet such an insecure place?

What do we have to do, not in theory, not

to satisfy academic stuff, but like, real

world, what do we need to change

to make this thing secure?

All year, all my best research comes here.

All year I work on "What am I gonna bring"

to DEF CON for the next year" "What am

I gonna do for this particular event?"

Because it's where it began for me. My

career started because I started speaking

out here in Vegas. I started coming out

to DEF CON and showing off these toys.

I'll be honest, a lot of my talks have had

nothing to do with security, it's just

like "Yo, look what I can

make THAT thing do!"

The presentation was just facilitating dialog

with this industry because unfortunately with

something like a major vulnerability in air

traffic control, there's no phone number to

call in for that and say "Hey, can we

talk about this?" That doesn't exist.

It was the first time I dealt with something

that was really serious. The entire talk

was theory. I had no facilities to

actually test anything in a real world

scenario because obviously I don't want to

be screwing with a plane while in flight.

(Now the attacker is one step away between

an evaluation and attacker controlled code.)

My talks are stories and that's the

one thing that I advise everyone else

giving a speech. You're telling a story

to your friends about some cool stuff.

I have hundreds of hours of research

that I have to tie together into a

coherent explanation of the world.

I was expecting a response and oh boy, did I get it.

I was talking to people

from major airlines, people with different

airplane manufacturers, air traffic controllers,

trainers, I've got a pocket full of business

cards after this that I have to go through.

This was me loudly knocking on the door

and saying "You might have a problem"

here. Let's talk about this."

Over the years, I've gotten relatively

high profile and I'm very happy and

honored for all the obligations that

come along with being a high profile

individual, but I do miss being able to

just wander through the crowds and see cool

stuff and watch cool talks. I've got a lot

of stuff I've gotta do; It's a lot of

obligations. I'm not complaining. This is

a tremendous amount of fun that I get to

have. I build all these crazy toys and

fill Penn and Teller and show them off.

The best moment for me at DEF CON is always

going to be at 4 in the morning when

someone's showing off some really silly

stunt that they built. And maybe it's

good and maybe it's not, but man they love

it and they're enjoying talking about it.

The community has matured from DEF CON 4

and 5 dramatically. When I was coming to

DEF CON 4 and DEF CON 5 and seeing people

in an official capacity, I'm now seeing

them bring their children and in some

cases their grandchildren to DEF CON 20.

I say "Great, bring your kids to DEF CON"

because there is no better community to

have your kids around than the people

that go to DEF CON. There's every

opportunity for them to learn something

and as long as you're a good

parent, as long as you're a good hacker,

anything that they see or experience you

can lead them on that path.

Yep, so this is plastic. So, this is just

a long string of plastic. So it goes into

this, this thing melts it. There's a

little heater in here that melts it, and

then it squirts it out as the machine...

Yeah, it's like toothpaste.

This is the second time for DEF CON Kids and

the second time that I've been involved

and DEF CON Kids. Last year sort of was just

a smaller way to try to get kids and their

parents involved in the hacker community

and basically teach kids about lockpicking

and soldering and hardware hacking and

privacy issues and law enforcement issues,

just all of the things that kids

don't normally learn in school.

Speaking at DEF CON Kids and working with

these kids is almost more exciting to me,

or just as exciting if not more, than

giving a talk at DEF CON and having an

opportunity to directly influence these kids.

It's like an immediate... you can see

it in their eyes, it's this immediate

understanding once you show them something.

They get it, and that

can change their life.

I would like to start programming, I would

like to start learning the languages

that they mentioned, for example, I

would like to start learning python.

What we were thinking of doing is adding

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