What’s Good and What’s Bullshit at DefCon 13
This is more for my scheduling purposes than anything else, but I thought I’d share. Given that my friends and I will be busy with Capture The Flag at this year’s DefCon (just mere weeks away!) I won’t have a lot of time to see talks. I played in CTF last year and didn’t see a single talk; given that I’m helping to run the contest this year I don’t have high hopes for my free time.
If I get a spare minute this is what I’ll be seeing, what I’ll be avoiding, and what I’ll be divided on, culled from the DefCon 13 Speakers Page:
Good
appropriate to the conference, covers new material, challenges the audience
- Routing in the Dark: Scalable Searches in Dark P2P Networks
- The Information Security Industry: $3 Billion of Snake Oil (editor’s note: you had me at the title)
- The Next Generation of Cryptanalytic Hardware
- Google Hacking for Penetration Testers (editor’s note: seems like a mundane topic but the speaker is a sharp fella)
- Suicidal Linux (editor’s note: Bruce does a good rant)
- Pen-testing the Backbone
Bullshit
tired topics, conference-unspecific material, non-technical, pandering, goofy, “hacker sociology” horseshit, tedious libertarianism, too academic, too corporate
- A New Hybrid Approach for Infrastructure Discovery
- On the Current State of Remote Active OS Fingerprinting
- Introducing the Bastille Hardening Assessment Tool
- Development of An Undergraduate Security Program
- Be Your Own Telephone Company…With Asterisk
- Analysis of Identity Creation Detection Schemes post-9/11 (editor’s note: bonus bullshit for use of the phrase "post-9/11)
- Countering Denial of Information Attacks
- CISO Q&A with Dark Tangent
- Whiz Kids or Juvenile Delinquents: A Sociological Perspective The Construction of Hacker Identity
- Introduction to Lockpicking and Physical Security
- The Hacker?̢̢s Guide to Search and Arrest
- The Power to Map: How Cyberspace Is Imagined Through Cartography
- Hacking Nmap
- A Safecracking Double Feature: Dial ?̢??B?̢̢?? For BackDialing and Spike the Wonder Safe
- Bacon: A Framework for Auditing and Penetration Testing
- Inequality and Risk (editor’s note: please stop talking, Paul Graham)
- Top Ten Legal Issues in Computer Security
- The Insecure Workstation II: “bob reloaded”
- Your Defense is Offensive
- No Women Allowed? Exploring Gender Differences In Hacking
- Meme Mining for Fun and Profit
- Credit Cards: Everything You have Ever Wanted to Know
- Black Ops 2005
- Passive Host Auditing
- Doing Not-For-Profit Tech: The Hacker Foundation Year in Review
- A Linguistic Platform for Threat Development
- Introducing Unicornscan – Riding the Unicorn
- The Dark Side of Winsock
- Social Engineering Do’s & Don’ts (A Female Perspective)
- The Six Year Old Hacker: No More Script Kiddies
- Old Skewl Hacking – InfraRed
- Visual Security Event Analysis
- Meet the Fed
- Hacking the Mind (Influence and NLP)
- Ask EFF: The Year in Digital Liberties
- Causing the Law
- Bypassing Authenticated Wireless Networks
- Assymetric Digital Warfare
- Licensing Agreements 101: The Creative Commons License
- Hacking Windows CE
- Why Tech Documentaries are Impossible (And why we have to do them anyway.)
- Automation – Deus ex Machina or Rube Goldberg Machine?
- Forensic Data Acquisition Tools
- Building WarDriving Hardware Workshop
- Legal and Ethical Aspects of WarDriving
- The NMRC Warez 2005 Extravaganza
- Attacking Web Services: The Next Generation of Vulnerable Apps
- Hacking Google AdWords
- The Revolution Will Not Be Copyrighted: Why You Should Care About Free Culture
- Recapturing the Revolutionary Heart of Hacking
- Hackers and the Media- Misconceptions and Critical Tools To Combat Them
- Paul Vixie Speaks
- Trends in Licensing of Security Tools
- Attacking Biometric Access Control Systems
- The Unveiling of My Next Big Project
Could Go Either Way
might be good, might be bullshit
- Mosquito – Secure Remote Code Execution Framework
- Auto-adapting Stealth Communication Channels
- Sketchtools: Prototyping Physical Interfaces (editor’s note: this looks neat but is totally inappropriate for DefCon, which is the fault of the speaker reviewers and not this presenter)
- Hacking in a Foreign Language: A Network Security Guide to Russia (and Beyond)
- Intro to High Security Locks and Safes
- Surgical Recovery from Kernel-Level Rootkit Installations
- GeoIP Blocking, A Controversial But (Sometimes) Effective Approach
- Trust Transience: Post Intrusion SSH Hijacking
- ATM Network Vulnerabilities
- Shmoo-Fu: Hacker Goo, Goofs, and Gear with the Shmoo
- Shadow Walker: Raising The Bar For Rootkit Detection
- DIRA: Automatic Detection, Identification, and Repair of Control-Hijacking Attacks
- Physical Security Bypass Techniques: Exploring the Ethics of Full Disclosure
- End-to-End Voice Encryption over GSM: A Different Approach