Kernelcon – An Epic Gathering of Hackers

This conference was incredibly well organized. Not only was our parking paid for, but upon arrival we were greeted by these vinyl pillar wraps which made it immediately clear this conference had thought of everything. After registering, we were given our swag bags which were loaded with stickers, quality notebooks, pens, extra soft t-shirts in our size, our conference badges, and an assortment of goods from various sponsors.

The badges were fully functioning circuit boards that came with 5 LED lights and programmed to allow attendees to changes colors and patterns. Not only was that fun, but they were hackable! People could take their badges to the Hardware Hacking Village in the conference to extend their badges and add even more blinking lights. Along with the actual badges, the conference had a thoughtful privacy policy communicated via two different colored lanyards; if you wore the provided yellow lanyard, it meant that you were not interested in having your picture taken whereas if you wore the black lanyard, it meant you didn’t have a preference. Reminders were posted all around the convention since this was a security conference and people interested in security also tend to be interested in privacy. For the most part, everyone I encountered was very respectful of this policy.

Experience

I didn’t get a chance to attend the morning keynote as the first day, the workshop I wanted to attend started right away in the morning. But I can’t complain all that much because the workshop was fantastic. In it, we assembled an ODROID-GO. Now, this may look like a simple gaming emulator but it’s so much more than that. After installing a few things like the Arduino IDE and some packages that integrate it nicely with the ODROID-GO, we got to tinkering. Click here for the workshop syllabus repository.

Not only did we do these fun little projects, but we also wired up our boards to work with temperature sensors, connected them to a WiFi access point, and reported the temperature data to a server on the network. That’s right, this gameboy-looking device has WiFi on board, and can even connect to Bluetooth. There are so many possibilities!

Along with the workshops, there was a conference wide Capture The Flag (CTF) challenge where attendees could sign up as a team or individual, and score points for competing various challenges like “hacking” a server on the network, finding hidden WiFi access points, or picking locks. I wanted to participate, and even made some friends at the conference who also wanted to but we were so busy practicing lock picking, that we never got around to it.

The conference didn’t have a shortage of hackers doing what they do. One attendee, setup his software defined radio (SDR) and tuned it to the frequency of pagers. What does this mean? It means that this person was able to see all things sent back and forth between these devices since they are broadcast over the air like how any wireless technology is. Unfortunately for some of the patients at local hospitals, their personally identifying information was captured and shown to the world. Let this be a reminder to everyone to take their privacy seriously.

This conference took an interesting approach by not providing food to conference attendees and instead, opted for a lunch break. I think most people could appreciate this as it left lunch plans up to attendees and drove economic incentives for Omaha by bringing business into the downtown area. However; supper and drinks were provided at the after party thanks to sponsors. Along with sustenance, the after party made for a great opportunity for attendees to socialize. Mini-games were held, as well as “Who’s Slide is it Anyways” where participants were assigned a presentation with pre-made slides (unseen by them until the presentation) that were on a wide variety of topics like the History of Bitcoin, Why Sloths are Awesome, and my favorite; Corn. Why was corn my favorite? Because it’s the presentation my co-worker and I ended up giving AND WINNING.