DEF CON 34

Introduction

I have been fortunate enough to get a free badge for DEF CON 34 :O. I am not sure if this person was really allowed to let me borrow it, so I won't say too much, but the person saved me like over five hundred bucks in the end.

I was also super lucky last year and was able to go, but I went with my community college. (Shout out College of the Desert, the best community college ever.) DEF CON 33 was an incredible experience, and I absolutely loved being able to participate in the CTFs and look at so much cool stuff.

Unfortunately, this year I will be going by myself, but that does not mean that I will be alone. I am very much looking forward to making new friends and connections there, just as I did last year. Since I won't be with a buddy this time around, imhoppingintherobotnohesi, I wanna have some goals to help ensure that I am using my time effectively.

Goals

I wanna...

Conclusion

I am sure I can do all of these, but it's fun to at least have an idea of what I wanna accomplish. For the badge, I specifically wanna get this one, as the CTF style that it follows is incredibly broad and fun to do. I also got a badge from them last year, and it was a great experience.


when you complete the CTF, you get to grab your badge from this cool custom made vending machine

Will update after DEF CON...

DEFCON is over...

I had a great time :).

In terms of what I wanted to accomplish, I did basically everything.

I even won a badge from the Aerospace Village. This is generally what they look like:

These were the ones that my buddy and I won last year. The ones from this year were fairly similar, at least visually.

DEFCON was a ton of fun, and I was able to meet a ton of really cool people. If you are really into speedrunning, whether human or tool-assisted, you may recognize this little guy.

TASBOT at DEF CON

This is TASBOT. A little robot that does Tool-Assisted-Speedruns of games for charity through GDQ. (Games Done Quick) I've been watching this little guy do speedruns since I was in middle school, and funny enough, he was there at DEFCON. Impressively, it was playing both Super Mario World for the SNES and Super Smash Brothers Melee for the GameCube. I was even able to play against it in Melee, but unsurprisingly, I didn't stand a chance. Even more unsurprisingly, it played Fox, and was stupidly good. Here is a video of how it plays.

The only thing that I didn't end up going to was Hacker Jeopardy, but in all honesty, I was just so pooped from everything else that I had done. I had spent a lot of time at the Physical Security Village, and I even got a free handcuff key. Basically, if you were able to escape from being handcuffed behind your back with a bobby pin within thirty seconds, then they'd just give you a free key. I will say, it is shockingly easy to get out of handcuffs. Like I would say the average person could learn how to escape within five minutes, and then maybe half an hour, would be able to escape within thirty seconds. That being said, this is assuming you are in an environment where you are allowed to escape, for the most part, it is very easy to see that you are trying to get out of the handcuffs, and it definitely wouldn't work in a real life situation. (at least not within thirty seconds)

The handcuff key is stupidly simple.

Because the lock only has one pin, you can just lift that ONE pin and you're done. Here is a video describing the process. (Even the video over complicates it a little bit.)

But yeah, that's DEFCON 34 in a really really small nutshell. I really wanna go again, and I wanna be super prepared. The CTFs were much harder this year, likely due to the improved capabilities of AI. So for next year, I wanna really be able to compete, at least more than I did this year.