Dan [the] Salmon

As I alluded to in my previous post, I presented at SecretCon 2025 this past week. This was my first time attending after having heard about it for the first time a few months ago - I gather this is the 3rd year it has been held. Here are some highlights, in no particular order, from my day and a half there!

Badge

The badge did not disappoint - after turning it on, you can use the two buttons on the left and right of the screen used to cycle through the 20ish built-in animations. A few of them reveal the fact that there is a gyroscope on the board as they move when you tilt the badge.

I later learned that one of the challenges of the CTF (that I didn’t know was happening) was to open a serial console via the USB-C port, discover a text-based adventure game, and ascend to a certain level.

Hardware Hacking Village

At the hardware hacking village, a representative from GhostScale was running a soldering workshop. You would receive an ESP32, breakout board, and SD card reader which you could solder together. Then, you could flash the board with ESP32Marauder which can do Wifi and Bluetooth attacks. I definitely need to play with this board more as it also has space for additional modules to be added.

Aerospace Village

I didn’t grab a picture of it, but at this village there was a model airplane connected to a laptop which was running some sort of simulator. I believe the goal of the station was to issue commands to the onboard computer to see if you could override the safety controls. I ended up talking to the representative Lillian for a good while about everything GNSS, GPS, ADB, and airplane electronics systems design. It was truly fascinating.

Tin Foil Hat Competition

I spent a solid hour here. They had a mannequin head set up on the table with a HackRF antenna embedded inside. The goal of the contest was to design a hat made from aluminum foil that would block out the most signals. More signals blocked = more points. After struggling with this for a while and using maybe 10 feet of foil, I managed to hit #2 on the scoreboard. After that, no matter what I added to the hat my score never improved. I walked away after a team walked up with a hat shaped not unlike a dunce cap and grabbed first place. I learned that I do not understand how radio waves work and the fact that my cell phone works at all is plain magic.

Lockpicking Village

This was a fun table to hang out at for a while. I enjoy picking locks, but I am not good at it - this became evident when I was only able to pick my way through 2 of the 6 challenge locks. I would have loved to have learned more about tubular locks, but none were available.

Talks

The talks I attended were great - especially the Friday keynote with Gabe. I have been subscribed to his channel saveitforparts for quite a while so it was cool seeing his talk Intercepting Satellite Data with Trash in person. It really got me excited to explore the world of SDR more which coincidentally is how I found his channel in the first place.

The Securing the Skies: Safety and Security in Aviation and Why It Matters talk by Lillian from the Aerospace Village was also fascinating. I learned a ton about the safety certifications of equipment that goes into planes and how security testing plays a major role in safety testing.

The closing keynote was a super fun story that there just wasn’t enough time to explore deeply: Closing Keynote: We Infiltrated a North Korean Laptop Farm, Here’s How We Did It. DPRK remote worker schemes are endlessly fascinating to me and just this week, the DOJ announced the takedown of a major network of laptop farms in the US. I look forward to seeing if he gives this talk at another conference so I can hear the full story.