This past weekend, Aaron and I attended and presented at ToorCon Seattle 2008. The format of the conference consisted of Lightning (5 min) talks on evening 1, short (20 min) talks on day 2, and Workshops (~4hrs) on day three. With plenty of parties in between.

One of the lightning talks we found interesting was:

Lisa Thalheim - Being a hacker in Germany - Current state of policital affairs:

Lisa gave a humour-filled overview of the new laws being passed in Germany and what that means for local hackers. Her discourse brought to light the results of uninformed and panicked lawmakers making decisions regarding information security.

Some of the full-length talks we enjoyed included:

TProphet - Phreaks, Confs, and Jail:

TProphet brought us back in time with a humorous recount of his and other's experiences with phreaking in the 90s. His talk also hit upon more current technologies such as VoIP and security implications that may arise.

Katie Moussouris - Secure the Planet! A Year in the Life of a Microsoft Security Strategist:

Katie related her experiences as a security strategist for Microsoft over the past year. We've run into Katie at many a conference and she has obviously been working hard to bridge the communication gaps between independent researchers and Microsoft. Her talk was interesting as it made apparent the efforts Microsoft has been putting forth to reach out to the security community.

Richard Johnson - Fast n Furious Transforms:

Rich's talk began with an introduction to Fourier transforms and how they can be used for signal processing. His talk centered around an application he is working on that can be thought of as a clone for the popular Guitar Hero game, except with a real guitar. His demos impressed all and the talk was well received.

Matt Miller - The State of the Exploit:

Matt talked about a new metric to apply to binaries to identify the likelihood of exploitability. It was well thought out and should be a good method to streamline vulnerability auditing.

Aaron Portnoy and Cameron Hotchkies - Reverse Engineering Cookbook:

This was our talk, so obviously we thought it was excellent. The talk itself went well, technical difficulties aside. We presented two of the scripts we've been working on internally that save time when reverse engineering with IDA. The first section covered cleaning up Objective-C binaries automatically and the second half was on Aaron's graph-based search scripts. Our slides are available here. We should be posting the IDAPython scripts in the next day or so.

The next day of the conference was reserved for workshops. I was lucky enough to attend the Hardware Reverse Engineering workshop taught by Bunnie Huang & Karsten Nohl, which was extremely interesting. They covered opening up chips and reading out the digital logic circuits that are embedded inside them. This was my first time looking at reversing from the hardware side. Coming to the workshop with a basic understanding of simple circuits and logical constructs was pretty much all that was necessary. They covered the rest well over the next 4 hours, including what is needed to set up a homebrew RE lab. Karsten even presented some software that uses facial recognition to automate identification of logic components. This workshop alone made ToorCon excellent, so when it's offered again, I would highly recommend it.

Like all conferences however, most of the real technical talking is done after hours. Aaron and I have a ton of ideas we brought back with us to work on, but we'll save that for another post.