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• Crypto Challenge HackChat Transcript

  Shulie Tornel • 08/11/2017 at 19:02 • 0 comments

  Sophi Kravitz OK let's get started

  davedarko colrceyhnpagtle. sounds klingon.

  Sophi Kravitz Who here worked on a badge?

  Karl Koscher I certainly did

  Bill-Paul I did. https://dc25spqr.com/

  Sophi Kravitz // waits ....

  jculberts o/

  jculberts I help Karl

  Sophi Kravitz Alright then! Karl and Bill, can you introduce yourselves? And then I reserve the right to ask the first question

  Sophi Kravitz Sorry Bill-Paul

  Karl Koscher Sure! I'm one of the organizers of the Crypto and Privacy Village at DEF CON. Part of my responsibilities include producing the badge :)

  Bill-Paul I did firmware development for the Ides of DEC CON badge along with John Adams. (Our friend Egan Hirvela did game play design for us and Matt Harris did the character art.)

  Bill-Paul I also work in the VxWorks Core OS group at Wind River Systems (an Intel company).

  Sophi Kravitz So first question is from me: how do you define crypto challenge? is there a challenge that everyone knows about or do you have to guess that there is one happening?

  Sophi Kravitz (after you guys are done with intros)

  Karl Koscher We have done a couple of crypto challenges in the past. They usually take the form of puzzles with elements that are woven into various things

  Karl Koscher This year we had a snapchat filter which interacted with the floor to produce something, puzzles on the physical badge, part of puzzles on the lanyard and keys we gave out, and a bunch more on our website

  Bill-Paul In our case there were a couple of puzzles (which John worked on mostly). There was a URL that led to some puzzles, and we had one special unlock code that led to a puzzle for an invite to a party at the con.

  -= Wolf =- what is the main purpose of a crypto challenge? to grow interest on Crypto software?, to keep people interested on the subject? or just fun?

  Karl Koscher In the past, we used the badge to validate answers to the puzzle, and even had a challenge hidden in the badge

  Sophi Kravitz @Karl Koscher how did people know there was a challenge?

  Bill-Paul Oh, also, one of our sponsors (Avast) asked us to include a touch-tone audio sequence which would lead you to an IP address and port where they had an old school BBS set up.

  Karl Koscher I guess if it's your first time at DEF CON you might not know, especially if you don't interact with other people, but it's pretty obvious to people looking for one

  Karl Koscher like, we have random letters on the lanyard. what other purpose would those have? :)

  Karl Koscher and random dot patterns on the badge

  Sophi Kravitz ah ok

  Sophi Kravitz I have not been to DEF CON

  Bill-Paul Apparently some people can decode the tones by ear so we were counting on that.

  Karl Koscher I believe this year we actually had handouts for some of the puzzles at our info desk, so it was easy to find

  Sophi Kravitz I imagine that many people on this chat haven't been either

  Shulie: Decode the tones by ear, wow, that is insane. :)

  Sophi Kravitz by ear???? WHAT?

  Frank Buss @Karl Koscher are you LosT/李智上 on twitter?

  Bill-Paul Yeah, I think hard core phreakers have the sounds memorized or something. :)

  James Murphy I've been following Def Con for about 7 years but have never attended. I would like to but $$ is the issue.

  Karl Koscher I am not LosT

  Bill-Paul I actually have a touch-done decoder board I built years ago using a DTMF decode chip from Radio Shack which I used to validate that we were generating them right.

  jculberts 
  Bill-Paul Of course you could also just look in the source code. :)

  jculberts These are the puzzles at the top of the badge.

  Frank Buss I tried some of the puzzles, but too complicated for me

  jculberts dang, it didn't keep the rotation.

  Karl Koscher @jculberts: can you also post a photo of the dots?

  jculberts also, the box has a nice inviting...

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