1st Talk

Hackers gonna hack - But why?

Speaker

Helen Thackray, PhD Researcher (@hel_ty)

Synopsis

This talk will explore how social science should be used to improve understanding of actors involved in an information security incident and how this can help the info-sec community. There are wide social psychological processes that influence everyone who takes part in online communities. These processes are important; they determine how we understand, perceive and interact with the members of our own group and the groups around us. It will be discussed how, regardless of how much of an anarchist or rebel we might be, individuals are strongly influenced by the norms and identity of their group - and whether this is a good thing or not.

This talk will give examples of the significance of the group processes in trust, decision making and risk with in online hacking communities, and the parallels with the info-sec community. The talk will conclude by sharing some the data collected for this project as well as the reactions of the communities to the research.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Defcon/comments/5ufve6/call_for_participants_doctoral_study_xpost/

2nd Talk

Inside our Toys

Speaker

Kev Sheldrake (@kevsheldrake)

Synopsis

While we all like to make, modify and re-appropriate technology, some of us like to break it for, um, fun and profit. I will explain how I go about finding vulnerabilities in IoT devices, looking at hardware, software and cryptographic attacks that can give us root on our toys.

Rather than focus on specific bugs in particular devices, this talk will describe a number of generic attacks that can be attempted against a wide variety of networked ‘things’. The attacks range from the trivial that anyone with a soldering iron and a few bits and bobs could attempt, through those that require moderate linux knowledge, to those that require a disassembler and a knowledge of reverse engineering.

It should be of interest to anyone who would like to root their own shiny, IoT devices.