First talk

Beating the Queue: A Hacker’s View of HFT

Speaker

Emil Lerner

Synopsis

Most tech people assume high-frequency trading is just about spending millions on infrastructure and pushing everything onto FPGAs and custom hardware. The reality is more interesting: at the end of the day, a stock exchange is just software - and that means it can potentially be “hacked” to get your messages processed earlier than those of competitors. You end up treating the exchange like a target: reverse-engineering behaviour, probing infrastructure, and figuring out how messages actually flow through the system.

In this talk, I’ll walk through several practical cases of how exchange infrastructure can be exploited to gain latency advantages. I’ll cover both traditional exchanges, which tend to run heavily customised in-house systems, and centralised crypto venues, which often rely on more conventional stacks - things like AWS, standard load balancers, and other infrastructure that can sometimes be reverse-engineered or partially replicated.

Second talk

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Speaker

You?

Future talks

We’re still trying to build up a backlog of talks. If you’ve implemented a C2 on a smartwatch, want to walk us through the highlights of a CTF, or have some insight into the breakdown of security cooperation globally, we’re interested!

Drop a message to talks@dc4420.org with a title, synopsis and rough length, and don’t worry if you haven’t presented before.

We’re also happy to host other activities, like lockpicking, or demoing a new piece of kit, just let us know.

New location

We are no longer at the Phoenix! The next meeting will be at:

The Greene Man
383 Euston Road
London NW1 3AU

Closest stations: Great Portland Street, Warren Street, Euston.

We’ll start around 7:30pm as usual, but feel free to turn up from 6:45pm to settle in.