Intellectual Property Law

Exclusive Peek Inside Defcon?s High-Tech Badge

By Dave Bullock

LAS VEGAS — Thousands of hackers, script-kiddies, feds and security professionals will be gathering at the Riviera Hotel and Casino this weekend for DefCon, the world’s largest hacker convention and they’ll all have one thing in common: Joe “Kingpin” Grand’s custom-engineered badge.

Normal conventions have a paper or plastic based badge, but Defcon has been putting out badges for the last four years with electronic functionality. This year, Defcon’s 17th, Grand and Jeff “Dark Tangent” Moss, the creator and mastermind behind Defcon, have taken the badge to the next level.

Sporting a cleaner design, and a component-free face, the new badges pack a functioning microphone, full-color LED and an advanced digital signal processing microprocessor.

The new badges are both simpler in design, and more difficult to hack, than in years past, says Grand, an electrical engineer, TV personality and founding member of the L0pht hacker collective. “Each year we try to show off cool new technologies and interesting circuit design features that have never been done before,” he explains. “Making the badge hackable is an important aspect of the badge, but we didn’t want to make it as easy as last year.”

Hacking the badges to add interesting functionality is one of the many contests at Defcon that offer attendees a shot at winning the “Über Badge” — which gives them free access to Defcon for life.

Grand worked with Moss and “Black Beetle”, the person behind the design aesthetic, to create custom circuit boards especially crafted for hacking. This year there are different badges for each type of attendee: human, press, goon (the volunteers who staff the con), vendor, speaker, contest and über.

What the badges actually do with their components is a closely-guarded secret, pending a Friday presentation. But if you must know, you can download this exclusive early release of the Defcon 17 badge source code. Happy hacking.

The back of the Defcon 17 badge shows the batter holder, microphone, processor and multi-color LED.

Photos and source code courtesy of Joe Grand and Jeff Moss.

Full post as published by Threat Level on July 29, 2009 (boomark / email).