 This is the DEF CON 30 Hardware Hacking Village where you can come to solder all these different badges that you get around CON. What? What? This is the Hardware Hacking Village. That's the soldering skills village. So what do you do in the Hardware Hacking Village then? All sorts of things. Not soldering. I mean we do soldering, that's an important skill to have, but we do a lot of other things too in terms of taking things apart, making things new. We have a couple of competitions going on this year. Make your own use, literally you take a thing and make it do something it was never intended to do. Which is one of the definitions we've said is a definition of a hacker finding something using the way it was intended. Absolutely. We also have a make, bring the other half and that's, we provide a software blog, we give you a firmware blog and you build the hardware around it and make it do something with that software. See what's amazing to me, hold on, in my defense by the way about the soldering comment, Hardware Hacking started as Hardware Hacking. Yes. And then it expanded and badge life sort of came out and then everyone was assembling those and as that grew it started feeling like it overtook it. But then all of a sudden this happened. There was a huge room of hardware hackers really like doing contests and figuring out how electronics worked and I remember there was just a box of junk where you would grab a piece out and what would end up you would do is you go okay I'm going to look, I don't know what it is, you're going to pull off a piece of the chip and then… We still have that. It's, it lives on the soldering side now because a lot of that you've got to pull apart but we still have a pile, we call it the source pile, it's kind of give and take, I donated a bunch of, not junk but it's junk and so it's got a lot of useful stuff in there still but it's not useful as it is. So yeah you can grab a part, pull stuff off, you need a USB connector, oh that one's got a USB connector, desolder it, now it's yours. And then you start building stuff over here, if you think about it like one of the things that you told me about was when you're reverse engineering a piece of hardware it starts with discovery, first take a look at what it is and then you start building on those concepts. I remember doing your hardware hacking challenge where I'm like following traces and things like that. You started jumping down the challenges, what other challenges are there? Behind me, one of our other volunteers, Rare, he's putting together a CTF and the way this one kind of works is we pretend that the HHV became an evil corporation and we're making badges for badge life. Makes perfect sense. Yes, so we've made a chip, we've got a data sheet for it, you start by looking at the data sheet figuring out what it does and oh hey there's a flag there for the CTF hint and from there that's where we add the SAO badges, so you get one and we actually added DRM to our SAO badges this year, so the contest is breaking that DRM. It's a little contrived but it works, it demonstrates what you're supposed to do and how that works and find things out. So what's crazy to me about the hardware hacking village is I have not gone that deep in hardware hacking is you have all the tools here and all the knowledge to do it but then you can advance up where you have a digital logic analyzer, you're doing what is acid washing on a chip to then attach the context inside the chip to see what's happening. I have acid here, never happened, continue. But when you're talking about those different types of challenges here, you have digital logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, all of these different tools, what are some of the cool projects that you've seen people working on using some of these things? Oh boy. And as one I remember like Joe Gran did a cool video on grabbing like a crypto wallet, ripping that apart and talking about the process of here's how you dump private keys. Is that the type of stuff that happens in this village? It can. I've seen it happen before. Actually one of my favorite memories from long ago in the HHV was someone built a large coil specifically to blow up RFID cards. You put enough, it was basically a big coil, you put a big capacitor on it, dumped a bunch of voltage into it and it would just blow up RFID cards. That's actually pretty incredible. It made a loud pop. You knew what was going on. It's okay though, that happened at the RIV. It happened at the RIV. Yeah. Never, never in Caesar's form. Never. So with some of the other aspects, what else, if I was a noob coming into this area, where would you tell me to start? Honestly, the front table over there, we've got a couple of simple displays and demos. I actually put together a set of plates that are delaminated PCBs. So if you ever wondered what different layers of a PCB look like and how they're stacked together, that fully pulls them apart and cases them in resin so you can get a close-up look and see how it all works. You can actually see a manufacturing defect on one of the boards. Really? So it could be useful for inspection as well. Next to that, there is a demo on a side channel timing attack. Also very contrived, but it's still the general concept. So you're inputting a pin and it's slowly leaking data out from LEDs. So how long it takes between you entering the last digit and it telling you that the pin was incorrect varies based on how many correct digits you have. That's fascinating in the sense of like, I remember, so we drew the NSEC CTF recently and that had one of those timing attacks where you'd send commands. There was sort of a specialty way of doing it where you like to like hit packets. I didn't even know those things existed within a hardware. And I will also say there's a fantastic tool that exists called the chip whisperer. It can do all sorts of things related to that including scripting. So you can plug all sorts of these wires into a single device and you can script the commands or actions it gives to the device and what it reads back. And you can have it do different things. You can scale the power, the voltage, you can glitch the voltage. So all these little things that cause hardware to give up its secrets and put it in mode that it was never supposed to be in. I think also it's fascinating with hardware hacking village is what starts here, ends up like morphing and sometimes turns into its own village. Like things like, again, the soldering skills village. You have like the RFID, the radio frequency village started here and then branched out into the con and now have grown and sprouted wings. If you were predicting, what do you think is the next thing that might sprout wings and start going? Boy, that's a good one. I'm stalling for time. No, if I had to predict what would come next from the HHV, it would probably be maybe more of the very nuanced timing attacks. You mentioned the cryptocurrency wallet that Joe Grand did. That was very much a very intricate attack. I can see that being more and more mainstream as more tools are available and cost effective for people to use. You've told me before there's this pendulum swing that happens where new technology comes out and it's too expensive for a hobbyist and then as that becomes the last of a cost, there's more innovation that happens which leads to new technology which has this similar problem. That's one of the things I've always loved about the hardware hacking village is there's just so much. For me who's in software and web, I know how deep that field is and hardware is usually kind of like, eh, it's hardware. But as we become friends over the years realizing like, oh my gosh, there really is crazy attacks here and even more so where in source code, I can obscure code, I can put cryptography on it. At a certain point, there's a trace there that I can read directly from. And what do you think is running your code? It's the hardware. That's a good point. Your code is actually being run by sand that we heated up and forced to think. It's cruel to make sand think, but we did. With that, I mean, there's so much more we can talk about the hardware hacking village, but I know like this place is crazy and you need to get back to helping people. I appreciate that. Thanks for, thank you so much for sharing. Thank you for watching and as always, hack on.