HOPE Day One

Saw sessions including "Hackers and Academia", "How to Steal Someone's Implanted RFID", "Mag Stripe Tech. and the MetroCard", "Lockpicking" and a keynote address by Richard Stallman. RFID session was very interesting, with two speaks, a women who had an RFID implant in her arm and her collegue hacker who wrote some custom software and hardware for reading her RFID. Dicussed security of RFID data and how easy it is to steal someone's RFID identity, which is just an unencrypted unique id number. Also discussed current uses of RFID in products, animals and humans. Good talk. Next was Mag Stripe talk given by Joe from 2600/off the hook radio show. Gave an overview of how mag stripes work, implementation of mag stripes (reading and writing) and how he reverse engineered current mag stripes on credit cards, gift cards and MetroCard. Wicked awesome. Then was a 2 hour mammoth talk on lock picking given by Toool, followed by a workshop downstairs where you can get hands on experience picking all sorts of locks using different techniques. Super in depth and really fascinating. Covered an old technique called 'bumping' which is gaining popularity again and which makes 95% of locks on the market vulnerable due to easy application of this picking method. You create a bump key (teeth filed down to 9 position) , put it into lock and bump the key with a hammer or 'tomahawk'. Force causes pins in lock to jump up past split point and at the right time, you turn and you're in! boom! easy. These guys did a lot of demos on the stage, real cool. they also picked another common lock using a paper towel roll and a combo lock using a simple pick. Also talked about legal aspects of lock picking, distribution of tools and bump keys, etc etc. Finally, keynote by RMS. This was super boring because he told me everything i already knew in a monotone voice. Q & A session was lame because all of his answers where either "i don't understand" or "that's a hypothetical situation, so i'm not going to answer your question". A lot of people kissed his ass. He is a christ figure. lame.

Flickr - H.O.P.E. Day One