 Coming up next is the badge talk. This is always one of my favorite talks every Defcon And we're running a little bit late, so I'll just get right out right to it So coming up to the stage. We've got DT and MK factor, which is Michael and Katie Okay, I can't get you from up here. So I'll take my mask off. You're safe Hey, welcome to Defcon 30 as you can imagine it has been a very tumultuous crazy crazy pants year and We are all super duper excited to actually be here and When I started seeing everybody around it's like this huge sense of relief, and I'm I'm not gonna lie after I'm done With this talk. I don't care if the place burns down You know, it's like I got it. We got it done. We got it here. It doesn't matter You know if it only lasts for a couple hours, but whoo So normally what we do in this talk is I kind of welcome everybody welcome everyone Just give you a quick overview of some of the challenges of Organizing the con and then we go right into the challenges of actually creating the badge What I hope most of you are wearing with the bags designers MK factor and Yeah, this year you've got some pretty good stories One one was the most impressive was a sort of I'm living in Singapore There in Utah and the time zone is terrible difference and it's for me It's like the morning and they're in the middle of the night And they're like we found this one chip and we need to order the chip right now And and yeah people were anyway good stories coming up stay tuned So what we try to do with the badge is We try to make it interactive. We try to make it collaborative We try to force you with mind control To use it to socially interact with others around you one more way for you to make an unexpected connection with a fellow hacker and Originally all the badges were simple Paper plastic metal and we always folks put a lot of time and trying to make them more counterfeit resistant Because after a few years people started copying them and Because we don't take corporate sponsorship the only way we make money is through selling badges and T-shirts and if that Gets undermined we don't have any other resources, you know any other revenue to fall back on so it turned into this cat-and-mouse game where the people counterfeiting would get better and better and we'd get better and better and And it finally they got so good It's like, you know, I don't mind if you can really counterfeit it at that level because there's only like three of you that can and and Why don't you give talks and tell us how you did it? Because it was really I mean they were like melting records and ovens and smudging things to get a reflection and I mean They were doing some really cool stuff. So every once in a while you'll see a display or you'll see a contest a badge counterfeiting contest And then at some point we realized that we shouldn't put all of our energy into the anti counterfeiting And we started to Joe grand. I was talking to Joe years ago and We were lamenting that if the end of the world was coming if Skynet was gonna wake up We need like an army of hackers to do battle against Skynet except everybody Is doing software nobody can hack the hardware of Skynet. So and Joe was one of the only hardware hackers I knew at the time and so we needed To build an army right to defend the world against Skynet. So how do we get hackers more interested in hardware and We created he designed him. We did the first electronic badge for hacking conference at Defconn and It was super super simple by today's standards But every year it got more complicated and better and new tricks and back then a lot of things were happening It was aluminum PCB. It was persistence of vision LEDs. It was infrared communication It was and it just took off and now badge life everybody. I think we helped accelerate The skill set to defend against Skynet. So thank you Defconn attendees for for jumping on board and and and now The badges are so complicated out there that other people are creating Honestly, it's too cost costly to really compete with some of them and we can't do a hundred dollar badge All right, we have we have some limitations and So it becomes more important for us on how to interact All right, the ideas behind them and maybe not the super duper build So it's been really fun. It's sort of like Launching something into the world and now it's sort of outgrown us a little bit. And so now we're just trying to Help inspire and and get more people involved. It's not supposed to be counterfeit proof. It's not supposed to be unhackable It's intentionally hackable So so that's sort of the idea with the badges and normally we alternate between a paper badge meaning a physical non-electronic badge an Electronic badge and even years are normally Physical and odd years are normally electronic and that's to help save us some money because they're so expensive to do But how can you not have an electronic badge for Defconn 30? Right, you got to have one. So we had an electronic badge last year. We had electronic badges this year We haven't figured out what we're doing next year yet You know, maybe you can do a mechanical computing badge Like an old curta calculator or slide rule badge Don't test me. You might be wearing one next year All right, so with that said I would like to introduce the badge team that was responsible for this wonderful Experience and later on we have other interactive Zubler has created some interactive bad stations. You'll see around where you can plug in your badge You can go head-to-head and and chill out rooms battling each other. There's some contests So there's some installation art stuff you can do with your badges, too We want it to be fun. Okay with that. I'd like to introduce the M and the K So, yeah, we're MK factor I'm Michael Katie so we have slides Okay You get to wait now. You're welcome. Does everyone love the badge? Yeah Sweet Does anyone hate it? I didn't set it up I'll just unplug it and plug it in that you aren't really held There was While he's fiddling that fiddling around maybe just tell him some stories about the background of the or the idea Yeah, so I guess we can talk about some of the ideas behind the badge. So You want to tell the story? Yeah So Last year I was talking to someone and he's like wouldn't it be cool to have a musical badge and I was like, yeah I would I would really love that idea And so we sat on it and we thought about it we also love the show Bob's burgers and Jean has a sampling keyboard which So Jean has a sampling keyboard which we'll see in a second That he loves to make sounds with and we're like, what's the better way to capture the sounds of Defcon? with the sampling keyboard, yeah First thing we want to do is thank all the people that came and helped us assemble these badges and helped us create them and oh My gosh, so many people that helped. It was amazing We have really great friends and family in the community is just amazing. Thank you everyone Yeah, thank you so much that we would not have made it without you All right, so let's talk about the the problem with the badges I'm sure some of you have Run into this and I apologize So there is a terrible terrible stupid design flaw in the badge. I take full responsibility for that so the problem is this little little bitty chip that's under the little cover board and that's the audio amplifier and What happens is that amplifier is designed to power a speaker and it does that really really well what it's not designed to do is be connected to an audio output and Well, I want to you know make excuses and whatnot and there are excuses, right? We had to change this last minute and supply chain being what it was We could only get certain things and fit it in budget and everything and I did not check that if this was going to be a problem and So it became a problem and that's the chip that burns out This is what's under that chip. It is a nine pin BGA flip chip It's pretty much microscopic. It's like one and a half millimeter square. It's ridiculous So if you have hurt your badge HHV does have some spare chips if your board is not too badly damaged They would be happy to help you fix your badge. Don't bring them and say fix my badge That's not going to happen. So Be willing to learn and Help do that The other thing we found out when we got here is The lanyards can cause problems and we did not know this because we didn't have the lanyards We didn't see them until we got here a few days ago And we didn't think they were that close to the hole or they would be big enough or yeah Yeah, that lanyard connector is the perfect size to wrap around that connector and just short it out So tape over that if you can we've got tape if you find us Yeah, yeah so With that out of the way This is our our original concept design so This is one of them. So we went through several different ideas We originally it was gonna be super simple, right because that's how you first start your badge And then you're like wait, I need this and now I need this But honestly it was literally gonna be four buttons and a screen and then your keyboard That didn't happen, but that's we had hopes So Yeah Like we said gene He has a sampling keyboard and so we were really excited when he's like I get we should buy these and play with them and see How they work and see if this is really our idea we want and so here's our kids They're like this is the coolest thing and so we all turned into Five and just pounding on these keyboards and having a great time and making sounds and things like that And we do have this keyboard with us So if you want to play with a real sampling keyboard that works really nicely Find us in the contest area All right, so artwork last year the theme with the you know the kind of 80s vibe and everything everything was hard lines and Very geometrical this year Katie got to run wild with the artwork and it's amazing Thank you Yeah, I had a lot of fun. It was kind of cool to just take stuff from different things. I Don't know what's to say, but you're enjoy Stock supply chain because it's a problem again and will be forever and ever and ever So this is one of the stories that DT had started talking about When was that February We reached out to him like oh my gosh, we found a chip that's in stock. That's not ten dollars. We need to buy these now and so Yeah, we bought a crazy number of these chips. It was a really weird circumstance so Raspberry Pi has on their site links to all the different distributors that have this chip and They One of them was digikey right and all these things were sold out everywhere and I happened to be searching on digikey one night and Came across this chip and they had like 50,000 of them in stock But the link on Raspberry Pi's website hadn't been updated yet to the new link on digikey. So it's like this is our moment. We've got Before anyone else sees this weird thing we need to just take these these will be ours Yeah, so yeah, we got that DT and bought those really quickly and to our great surprise digikey actually shipped them Well, yeah, I think I kept asking like, okay, did they go in the shopping basket? Yeah, yeah, okay Did it check out? Did it charge the credit card? Okay? Yeah, we've got them. Okay, and then you said on eBay people were marking these things up ten times Right they would people would swoop in see that a chip was in low supply buy them all Mark it up ten times on eBay and so I think a several times they contact me like we found the chip Oh, no, they're all gone. Yeah, okay. We have to redesign the whole badge now. Okay. We got another chip Oh, no, they're all gone. Okay. Now we have to redesign the back. It was like. Oh my gosh Yeah, so when we saw this we're like we want it can we have it Please let us have this because all the other ones were smaller and they were like eight bucks a chip And you would have had a board and a chip Yeah Yeah, and this also did pose some problems because if any of you have messed with the RP 2040 It doesn't have any audio stuff any DSP stuff. It doesn't have a floating point Stuff so It was a bit of a challenge programming wise all the audio on your badge is all in software But it's a good thing that chip is fast, but even so it's still 8-bit audio. So That was a compromise, but it works So custom parts The screen, I don't know if any of you have played with those little OLED screens Normally, they've got a big long flexible connector and it's to wrap around the back of a board and be soldered there That didn't work for us because everything needed to be on the front side of the board and no one made that screen with a short enough Cable on it and one that goes in a connector rather than soldered because we were not soldering that many screens And so we contacted the supplier and got those screens custom made with a very short little flexible cable on them. So They're custom you can't get your own there They're fancy So yeah, that's one of the cool things you can do when you're ordering many Crazy numbers of things you can get custom stuff kind of fun So then parts started arriving at our house We don't have a big house It was everywhere. Yeah, so these bins hold 4,000 audio cables There there were many more of these off-screen there And they were heavy DT are we allowed to say how many we made yeah, okay, so 25,000 is the number of badges we made So there were many of these buckets Yeah, two pallets of boxes just So Batteries, yeah, 25,000 badges so 75,000 triple-a's were delivered to our house Our the poor Amazon man. He's constantly like what are these? There are small boxes, but they were packed a punch So one of the things that happened is we got the battery holders and the batteries Right we ordered all the stuff for the badges all at the same time And so a lot of the parts and the circuit boards and everything those go to an assembly house And then batteries and battery holders came to us. And so we had some time So we pre-filled the two batteries on every single one of those battery holders And this picture on the right. I don't know if any of you notice. That's not right So when you order this many of something you start finding the weird ones So about one in every thousand battery holders was malformed or put together backwards Weird crazy stuff you find I Don't think our kids will ever want to see a battery again So they they had a blast opening the batteries I walk in the kitchen and they're like we made a pyramid Yeah, for reference each of those boxes is 50 batteries that's 8,500 batteries so just over 10% They were everywhere and we made some custom tools so those battery holders have like inch-long pins sticking out of them and We were not going to cut 50,000 pins by hand not gonna happen So I bought some metal shears at Harbor Freight and 3d printed a little jig for it And so we could just slide them through and cut all the the leads off the battery packs That was fun. Yeah, it was way fun. There's metal everywhere. It's fine and Jigs So we design and custom printed little jigs to bend the top boards enough to get them into the badges Without having to manually bend each one over. I don't know if any of you tried to do that with your hands It's not fun. I physically can't and so I was like we need something because I cannot do this 25,000 times So he's kind of amazing into that for us so and if any of you need help with that I've got some of these jigs on me. So I can help you put the top board back on or flip it over if you want Assembly PCB X is amazing. They did all the assembly on these boards They're based out of Ohio and they are awesome This is what they dealt with This is what got delivered to them bear circuit boards It's it's like 1800 pounds of circuit boards. It's ridiculous and so yeah, they Assembled all these put them in anti static bags Okay, so once we got to assembly We had to take them all out of their static bags all 25,000 of them and then we As you can tell the Jeff's us were awesome. They taught us how to like do it faster So we had like them everywhere and we were constantly unloading boxes and we had static bags everywhere So our next part of assembly we had to do soldering we soldered all of those battery packs Back on like on to the backs of these so we did 50,000 solder joints. It was great. It was fun Our kids got really good at soldering And Of course our good friends Troy and Burley they graciously You know offered their house as well for assembly so they Did thousands and thousands of them at their house as well and had them everywhere? Yeah, both houses looked very similar Boxes everywhere and badges everywhere Yeah, so many badges like that's a couple hundred on that table 25,000 is a ridiculous number Yeah, I think that's only 300 on that table They were bigger than we were expecting So our top boards for the human came as panels and we had to break them all apart So this is me and my mom sitting there breaking. We also have they did it at their house as well There was breaking everywhere. I did not see this picture till today that they used We used our hands So yeah, that was that was a fun there was fiberglass everywhere so yeah, one of our kids breaking more boards heat sealing and Putting little little cuts in every bag so you guys could rip them apart rip them open easily Yeah, it's just ridiculous So these are just some of the people that came to help of our friends family community We had just so many people Like for three or four weeks Yeah, yeah four weeks of assembly Ridiculous, I don't think I want to go in my shop for the next like month and I'd be happy Yeah, they had smiles till the end Well, we said smile for the picture So when we got to the den we're like, oh That's a lot of badges like that's more badges than we thought and we're like we're gonna need a hundred boxes We don't have a car that can do that Yeah, so each box of 250 is about 60 pounds So we loaded about 6,000 pounds worth of boxes in this U-Haul and tried it down here It was great. So for those of you who saw this picture on Twitter. I love the guesses. You're all way wrong We had lots of guesses around 13 14,000 we had the 30,000 guess, but yeah 25,000 and Badge challenge. I hope a bunch of you have started playing that and having fun Today you can actually do more with it because contest is open So These lovely ladies this morning. We went to set up our challenge table in the contest area and our boxes of stuff We're gone They were not where they were supposed to be Someone took them to the hardware hacking village in the Flamingo. I don't know why and It's okay. It happens. So these three lovely ladies ran and got them and brought them back to us It was fun. It was good. We got our cardio in and a lot of sweating So huge thank you to redacted who helped with the badge challenge and all the hardware set up for that It's awesome. Please go play with it and have fun On the badge challenge. Don't make real phone calls All right, there are special phones for you to use Don't call people and Make them mad Yeah, I'm sure people have been called Don't do that anymore Inspecting people So that's what we've got So if there's any questions, I think someone's gonna run around with a mic if you have questions for us Okay, we got a question in the front and then another question will be in the front to start off and then we'll work our way back Thank you Amazing badge, but fortunately mine got fried in the first 10 seconds So I guess my question is it's the same hardware, right all the badges or did I understood that wrong? There's the badges are different some of them Still working and mine is not so you're talking about between the different badge types Yeah, the hardware like the chips are being used Are they all the same hardware or they're different hardware specs for different types of badges? They're all the same hardware. Okay, and why are some of them are being fried the chips and some of them are still working It's the shorting out from either the lanyard or if you've created a loop of any sort All right. Thank you So Thanks for badges. They've been great. Love the musical tones and Obviously making these there's a lot of repetition But what would you say was the most dreadful part of repetition? Which part of this did you not ever want to do or see again? I know this one It's the I'm not going to Chris. It's it's the speakers Because when you the speakers are loose in there, right? We couldn't find one that could go through a reflow oven To do what we wanted to do and so That's why we made it the cute little thing that goes over it The speakers once you put that on there When you pop that thing off it creates a lot of force and so like it sometimes it would joint it And then you have to like pop it into place Also, I think about a third of our speakers all their leads were bent the wrong way So we had to go and bend them back so that they would touch where they're supposed to touch so Those damn speakers That's the part Again, thank you very much for the badges. They're awesome. Do you have a good source for the six pin SAO headers? Here at the con down at the hardware hacking village. We have four pin headers, but no six pins handy so We have some Don't you know mob us, but we have some available. I think HHV has a small selection of them and a lot of SAO Designers provided them with their SAO's All right, any other questions? He's gonna get his steps in So you mentioned as you were starting this the story before the slides came up You mentioned that you had heard. Yeah, wouldn't a musical badge be Be interesting. So was it just I mean, why did you choose the keyboard? Because of you know, the show that made it exciting to you or was there something about the music that really? Drew you into it differently. You know, why are we doing it with the keyboard versus any of the other types of music options you had? so Coming to the design choice, so we had several different ideas We thought like guitar hero kind of thing like where everyone had a different instrument It posed a Building like making it harder for us to have custom things to help us put the badges together But generally we we landed on the keyboard. I Felt like it was more relatable for everyone like everyone's touched keys on a keyboard before Do you know what I mean? And so I think more people are willing to I don't know. Maybe I think that's where it was The sampling was a really big part of it so the people could record their own sounds and play them and You know add their own sounds to Def Con I've seen a couple that have a different color. Is there any significance to the color of the badge? Sorry say that again. Sorry. We couldn't hear you Is there any significance to the color of the badge the color of the badge? Like the different types Yes, yeah, so all the different colors are for different groups of people So other than the the white black ones like red is for goon There's some for all the different people that help run the conference basically you got your speaker you got CFP you have Press you have Contest village vendor So there's nine different colors Does that answer your question? And they all have something different on them Hey, so this is my first Def Con. I just wanted to say For me personally, I love the I love the keyboard this you couldn't have picked a better theme badge for me personally And I just wanted to say thank you for all the effort. That's an incredible amount of effort Thank you. Thank you. I got it one one to your to your right Further right but okay So a two-part question first of all, is it possible to Reset the challenge to factory state? I know like when you pull the battery and then put it back in and and start it up it resumes where you were in the in the challenge and secondly Do you think it's theoretically possible to? Like does the chip have any more capacity to maybe do like a more advanced synth or anything like that Okay, so Yeah, so to reset it From raspberry pi they have you have to file called flash nuke dump that on there and then We'll need to We release the firmware not yet. I don't think we have we will throw the firmware up on the Badge website, so then you can reflash and that'll put you back to the beginning For the other one, there's tons of flash space left There's not a whole lot of extra Processing power available mainly due to my terrible code I don't know if any of you've noticed if you press like four more keys at once It kind of hangs there and the screen doesn't update for a second So yeah, we're right at the limit of what it can do with my terrible coding skills I think you're so I was up till two in the morning decompiling assembly code, so thank you for that So I've called all my friends, but can you actually call Jenny? I mean, yeah I can't give too much away, but maybe you know there's there's a whole area of contests in the Venue here, so just don't use a real phone. Yeah, no no real phones. Don't use your cell phones for it There's a special Any other questions Hey, thanks again, what was the budget per badge? Are you allowed to say no we don't talk about budget? Okay, that's fine. Yeah Thank you. I'm just curious Can we try what it sounds like if everybody in this room plays something at the same time? Say it one more time, please. Can we all play something on our badges right now at the same time to test what it sounds like Get in do it What are we all playing the final countdown or I'm so good Frickin hands. That's awesome A little bit creepy, all right I hope to hear the creepy sounds throughout the whole like hotels as well. I would enjoy that Excellent Great idea. Hi folks, how are you? This is my first fcon But so I just came from my first sky talk and It was it was really interesting, but on my way up You know, I got yelled at put away my phone for talking or on possibly and I was just wondering how Hard or theoretical would it be to repurpose it? So you can turn this into a recording device in the middle of sky talks because that puts a recording device in every single person's hand here I mean don't do that. No, I'm just I'm just I'm just You know putting it out there because I I brought it up to them and I was just I looked around and I was just kind of like Holy shit So so the default programming you've got three samples one second each for recording So, okay. Yeah, so there's not enough memory to hold enough audio. You could you could secretly record three seconds Okay, so that's good. Good. Thank you. All right. Any other questions? Oh Right here. So awesome badge And when I first saw it I was like, oh dang, I should have paid more attention in music classes So did you have to do some research in terms of how to read a music sheets or anything like that? Or were you already musically inclined? I'm not but she's musically inclined So music's been part of my whole life I perform in theater and do musical theater and so I was like I'm happy to do and I play the piano a little bit like this hand really well this hand doesn't do so great But this hand is great I just want to thank the community of death con for Re-sharing my final countdown video I posted on on the forum Literally the most likes and shares and views I got on all my music So I want to thank you guys for just completely just going wild just re-sharing that so it made a big big big impact on music Thanks. Thank you. Thanks All right, any more questions you only got time for one or two more All right right here. Hey, awesome. Thanks for the badge. It's been actually pretty fantastic This is actually in regards to the badge challenge So I guess minor spoilers for some people Will the I guess the Phone system or whatever it that you guys have on the badge challenge. Well, that may be made available for post conference usage No, it won't be available after con We might be able to work something out, but I wouldn't count on it at this point Last question how long do you expect the batteries to last for did you test that at all? We did test the batteries a bit it depends on a lot of things So just leaving it on it'll go to sleep after a few minutes And that should last pretty much the duration of the conference the more you play with it the faster It's gonna die if you got an SAO. It's really gonna die All right, thank you so much for coming to the badge talk Let's see you at the con