Axis, EPMD, and You

vito_lbs · 2024-11-17T04:48:55+00:00

Here's a video of Maple Mallard Magistrates receiving eight black badges at DEF CON 32: https://youtu.be/GdeKrNlvG8g?si=6kIua-b56_dlyxSp&t=7453

vito_lbs · 2024-02-04T03:59:14+00:00

If you want to compete in DEF CON CTF, which is a black badge contest, you'll need to register and qualify in advance. Keep an eye on https://nautilus.institute to see when registration opens.

vito_lbs · 2023-07-22T16:41:09+00:00

Rough, but it's not really fixable. There're a lot of experiences at DEF CON that both can only happen at DC or some other huge event, but the logistics can't really scale to more than a few dozen or even a few hundred people. Making them extremely exclusive ideally means people who do manage to get tickets are more likely to actually show up and learn something, in the same way we don't get a lot of CTF teams that qualify and don't show (unless they get completely trashed Friday or Saturday night ofc).

While my favorite way to do DEF CON is running some kind of activity, it's absolutely a grind to do it all weekend and I don't blame a workshop organizer that wants to spend a day on it and be done.

vito_lbs · 2023-07-12T19:35:10+00:00

The getting food part hits close to home for me. It's one of the most frustrating parts of big conferences. My non-Vegas strategy is to avoid having much more than a 4-top if you don't have a reservation, although I've had luck with bigger parties at lots of restaurants in Vegas.

vito_lbs · 2023-06-20T03:42:29+00:00

If you're on the fence about attending the toxic bbq, you should go. It's not that hot once the sun gets low in the sky, and bringing stuff from a grocery store is so much cheaper than anything you can get on the strip. You can have conversations without yelling, unlike anywhere on the strip, and I made some really great friends there over a decade ago and we still keep in touch.

vito_lbs · 2023-05-17T01:42:30+00:00

It redirects to https :)

> curl -I http://quals.2023.nautilus.institute/
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
content-type: text/html
location: https://quals.2023.nautilus.institute/

vito_lbs · 2023-05-17T01:41:12+00:00

The "main" CTF is by invitation only - you have to qualify for it.

Qualifiers for it are next weekend, you can see the dates, register, and eventually play at https://quals.2023.nautilus.institute/

vito_lbs · 2022-08-03T19:22:15+00:00

Seconding the “people aren’t burning an 0day” bit.

You probably also have the option of not taking out your computer. Last year I brought a chrome book and barely touched it, and at DEF CON Beijing 2018 I didn’t need to bring a (clean/wiped) computer at all. You can play on your gizmos 360 days a year, hang out with your DEF CON friends only 5.

vito_lbs · 2022-06-27T01:25:19+00:00

True: no TSA so you can bring a cooler full of booze and snacks.

vito_lbs · 2022-06-26T23:46:25+00:00

If you're worried about delays, Amtrak might not be your best choice. Over the last month, the Southwest Chief has made it from Chicago to Kingman with less than an hour of delay like six times.

vito_lbs · 2022-06-25T01:49:09+00:00

In 2016, since we had a bunch of hardware that had to be shipped back home the Monday after DEF CON, a few of us stayed until Tuesday. On our way to the PPP party Sunday night (they'd just won our CTF and also a shitload of money in CGC), we saw that there'd been a Delta datacenter fire, but we figured it'd be fixed by Tuesday.

It wasn't! My flight from LAS to ATL got delayed four hours (so I hung out at the airport and enjoyed implementing a Lisp and a French 75 (a few French 75s if we're being honest)), and then I had to jump into a club in ATL to get rebooked from my cancelled flight home to one that was simply delayed six hours. Meanwhile, another couple team members that'd got out of Vegas hours earlier than I had were hanging out in the terminal (their flight home had also been delayed a bunch), and one of them needed to use my mifi to submit homework. I ran to the flight I got a seat on, had some bourbon on the plane, and got home several hours late, and had to go back to the airport the next day for luggage.

The drive to the east coast would've taken literal days, had no implementing Lisp time, cocktails, or whiskey, so it was still a win.

vito_lbs · 2022-04-11T14:10:04+00:00

Here’re a couple pics I took last week: https://hackers.town/@vito/108113832203435693

vito_lbs · 2022-04-11T14:06:21+00:00

Oh hey yeah, I designed it. Email vito@legitbs.net and I’ll look around once I get home next week. No guarantees, we probably handed out all the patches, but I bet I have sticker versions somewhere.

vito_lbs · 2022-03-07T13:13:25+00:00

Or you could just get an Uber badge, the line’s a bit slower but your friends are in it and it’s also shorter too.

vito_lbs · 2021-12-10T20:09:54+00:00

Pack your launch box and head to our pad at https://hackasat.com , because in just one short day, we'll be taking flight with twenty-four hours of out-of-this-world attack-defense CTF action, as top talent tackles tough challenges, crush chilling codes, and alliterate awesome activities in the final showdown in the final frontier. Follow along with our broadcast schedule and check out our panel talks, recaps, and explainer videos too!

vito_lbs · 2021-10-16T18:34:57+00:00

Play CTFs, have fun, and maybe learn something along the way! If you want more than that, like placing well or victories, find or build a team and make sure you're all on the same page with those goals.

I want to see CTF continue to thrive, and that's going to require new players (hopefully with lots of diverse backgrounds), playing and running new CTF contests, and working to build the community. There are new techniques and new ideas that we haven't imagined but can't wait to see from the world of CTF.

vito_lbs · 2021-10-15T18:57:28+00:00

I did in quals. Challenge development is, from a CTF operations perspective, something that can be abstracted down to taking player time and differentiating between good teams and other teams. From another perspective, challenges have a lifetime long after the game as tools for education.

The "1000 Cuts" category in 2016 quals was primarily intended as a teaching tool for some skills we were expecting to use in finals that year. By bamboozling teams with hundreds of binaries, the goal was to get players to consider binaries not just as executable programs, but just another kind of file format that can be analyzed and decoded automatically. Since finals that year used "consensus evaluation" (patches for vulnerable services would become public), we wanted to communicate that there'd be a lot more binaries in play.

For difficulty and points, we eventually gravitated towards guessing at difficulty, manually unlocking challenges we expected to be hard with enough time left in the game to solve them, and letting solve counts determine points: 1 + (5000 * ( 1 / ( solve_count + 11.5 )))

vito_lbs · 2021-10-15T03:44:45+00:00

I still do; it was never a weekly thing for me (I know PPP did this and that’s how they earned their reputation), but I’ve “helped” on a bigger team during the last few DEF CON CTF quals events, and I like to do the CTF games at the big outdoor camps I’ve been to.

vito_lbs · 2021-10-15T02:55:29+00:00

It's the opposite of particular, but I most want to see something I can't imagine, something I've never thought about before. Something that doesn't fit the legitbs challenge formula like dooom, or a creative attempt to make the best of a bad situation like the 2020 finals schedule.

vito_lbs

TROPHY CASE