This is an ultra-rare badge - so far there’s only one. You can check out the design, which is based around an ATmega382, on the Team Bazooka repo. This is becoming an incredibly popular setup for badges and other custom hardware. Powering it is a 18650 cell in a battery holder. The VFD is an HD44780 addressable character display. This badge was introduced to me as the only badge with a Vacuum Fluorescent Display on it. This is car hacking after all so the footprint on the left is for an ODB-II connector. An OLED display makes up the grill of the truck (which is a PCB itself) with amber blinkies all around.
DEFCON BLACK BADGE FULL
You can see the full glory in this animated Tweet. The assembly took longer than expected and the finished boards hadn’t arrived as of Thursday evening but did make it for sales in the village on Friday. This is the un-populated Car Hacking Village badge. Car Hacking Village Badgeīadgelife is often pushing right up against deadlines to get everything finished - this is an extracurricular activity after all. There were about 10 of these built to test out the breakout header for hardware hacking.
DEFCON BLACK BADGE CODE
The code running on the ARM processor was read protect and was using a Chip Whisperer to try to side-channel attack the badge. I was able to terminal into it and escalate my privileges to get root ( with on in the Chill Room. This was Tweeted out at the beginning of the con and once people unlocked theirs the botnet game began. They shipped with the multiplayer features disabled until a code was input. They had a hugely successful Kickstarter and everyone was trying to get one at the con. The Bender on a Bender was top three most popular badges at the con if not the most popular.
Here we can see the “God” badge that only the core team had. I’m not going to go too far into the AND!XOR badge since I did a full hands-on with the badge before the con. They are also joining in another trend, several badge groups (including MrRobotBadge) were giving away custom fidget spinners as swag. Last year they built a badge that was a shield for a Raspberry Pi and had a full-color video screen which they were showing off at the meetup. It’s their third year building badges for DEF CON and this one features four Cherry MX mechanical keyboard switches… clicky! The badge is a shield for an Arduino 101 ( RIP). The DC Zia crew had about 10 people working on the badge this year. I can’t wait to see what the artisanal hardware industry will look like in five years time.įidget spinners are popular as giveaways this year One thing is for sure - there were literally thousands of custom badges built and sold/distributed during DEF CON. What follows is the result of a frantic few hours trying to get through the sheer volume of badges and people to share with you all the custom hardware on display. I was able to get into the badge makers meetup on Thursday of DEF CON.
These, and some others using different hardware, adopted a unified API for command and control, both through makers’ “god mode” badges, and for wireless gaming between participant badges. In the multitude of images below you frequently see Rigado modules used. This year, there was a huge leap forward thanks to a unified badgelife API: the badge makers colluded with each on a unified communcations protocol. In the past badges were developed without much info getting out during the design process. This served as tech support, social hour, and feature brainstorming for all on the channel. Hardware badges were being made by several groups at that time but that was mainly happening in isolation while this year the badge makers are in constant contact with each other.Ī slack channel just for those working on their own DEF CON badges sprung up. I was first drawn to the custom hardware badges of the Whiskey Pirates at DC22 back in 2014. There is no better proof of this than the hardware clans that have grown up around DEF CON, which in recent years has become known as Badgelife.