It’s that time of year again. I had the opportunity to attend DEF CON 32 at Las Vegas with my friends Adrian and Ruien, my CTF teammates. DEF CON is the world’s largest cybersecurity convention, and this was my second DEF CON event. The event lasted for four days, so we made sure to spend that time in its fullest.

This year, DEF CON moved to an entirely new venue. Feast your eyes on the Las Vegas Convention Center, one of the largest convention centers in the world.

This photo was taken at 0.5x zoom

As expected, we were greeted by this hacked sign. This was how we knew we were at the right place.

Someone gave me some cool swag xD.

We spent the entirety of our first day in LineCon. I’m not exaggerating. I waited in the merch line for seven hours straight.

Anyways, this year’s DEF CON badge was a fully fleshed out entire RPG game made by a sole developer. More excitingly, DEF CON attendees were given exclusive access to the new RP2350 Raspberry PI MCU embedded within the badge.

The chip is the small black square at the bottom center

I tried to hack it, but eventually gave up because the tooling for such a new technology was virtually nonexistent.

Me trying and failing to install pico-sdk

The second day, we played a mini CTF called 5n4ck3y.

You don't get to say every day that you managed to brick a vending machine

And won a cool DOOM gameboy.

Yes, I did remove the plastic wrapper later

The day after that, we spent the entire afternoon playing our first attack and defense CTF. We managed to somehow win the first round by being quick, but placed third in the second round. Neither of us really knew what we were doing. We played blue team pretty much the entire time, changing passwords and rebooting attacked systems. Still, it was a cool learning experience.

We met a friend on our team as well.

Finally, on our last day, I visited some DEF CON villages and tried my hand at soldering and lock picking. I also got the chance to talk with other students from Purdue. Exciting stuff!

Of course, as my last remark, we can’t leave out our friend group shenanigans at the hotel.

This year’s DEF CON was awesome! Until next time!

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