badge creation this year and then if we have a little time left I'd love to do some questions from the audience. So that's the plan. See if it works out that way. Um okay I wanna see by a show of hands how many people are here for the very first time. Well I guess

for a welcoming session that makes sense. Congratulations. I'd love to figure out how you found your way here. Um cause we really don't advertise and it's always been word of mouth. I think maybe in the very early years I took out ads in like 2600 and there was a blacklisted 411 but after that last 20 years we just really haven't ever advertised.

It's all social media and when I talk to people about that their brains like you mean you have 30,000 people that show up in the desert and you don't have a dime spent on advertising. It's like we spend that money on like alcohol and other things. I'd

rather have servers and hard drives than a marketing person. So anyway so we've made it here by just weird coincidence of word of mouth and I think it's a winning formula. It's very social and so you'll notice a lot of the things that we say around Def Con are these sort of truisms like the con is what you make of it. And that sounds

marketing-ish but it's not invented by a marketer. It was more of a way of us saying basically it's what you make of it so go fix it yourself kind of right. If you see something wrong do something about it. Get some people together and if you see that mentality that's why with this year we have a record number of villages like 28 villages or

something. Yeah that's a record number and so tell you a little bit about you are all here experiencing our experiment, an experiment. I talked about it a little bit in the welcome

note in the program but we've never done multi-hotel before. It's all scary and brand new and we have no idea what to expect like will people venture out with the burning orb go across the street. How does that work? We have no idea let's find out. So once we

got that extra space because we were pretty certain we outgrew Caesars last year it allowed us to do things like grow for the first time in a number of years add new events that we've never been able to do. So there's more content in villages and contests now than

there are main speaking tracks right. It was always like the speaking track was the main thing and then we had some villages and contests but now because we have extra space and because we just try to give a platform to people who want to try something

new that side has exploded. So now we've got people who will never see a talk and only do villages and that's okay right. We record the talks we give them away for free do the things that you want to do don't feel that you have to see a talk or your friends will like talk shame you. You can make of the con what you want. So that brings me to my

question. So we couldn't record everything we wanted to but we record as much as we can and we release it all because if it's not recorded it sort of doesn't exist. And

the whole theory I guess behind Neptune is it's a community event I want everybody to get the information and in the early days I was concerned I was like well if I give away the content why would people come you know they'll just wait for it and then

that took about two years to figure out that no VR and augmented reality and meeting at a distance and tele travel and all this stuff nobody cares about that. We have faster bandwidth more realistic tele everything and all the conferences have record attendance. It's because people want to meet people. Right they don't want to meet

a iPad on a you know wheel driving around. They want to see actual humans. That's what's going on here and so ever since that realization every year I try to figure out how to make humans meet humans. What do we have to do? Break you guys into smaller

groups get you into lock picking get you into hardware hacking find little affinity groups. Yes there's billions of people here but we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get you into groups of people you want to meet and hang out with and then allow you to kind of jump around between that. So you guys think that's

working? Is that a worthy goal? Keep that up. There's no there's no manual for this so a lot of it we just kind of invent as we go. So for example some of the big inventions this year is really trying to increase transparency around the con. You saw some posts at the

last minute we've been working on for a while and then we realized you know if we don't post these soon it's gonna be too late. So a couple years ago we started putting the departments of where the goons are working on the back of their shirts and and last year we wanted to get every shirt individually named so you can see who you're

talking to. The problem is we realized a lot of people in Vegas wear backpacks and that would cover up the name and so we started to produce all these t-shirts with names on it that nobody would read. Like okay that's not gonna work. So this year we went to this patch idea where the patch kind of clamps on the badge and then that way when

you're talking to someone you kind of know who you're talking to and at first I thought you know that's lots of anonymity and it turns out the goons really like it because they can put whatever they want on there. So it's not like they're putting a real name but it was just a way for you to you know to personalize. We also started last year this

transparency report just trying to tell you like what kind of shenanigans we put up with, how many people we kick out and why, those kinds of things and I fully expect those numbers to increase because I think what's gonna happen is people are gonna get comfortable reporting things and as they get more comfortable the numbers will

increase just it's natural right. So if people think we're never gonna do anything about it they're not gonna report anything. They'll complain on Twitter but they won't tell us. We'll find out about it the hard way but if they see that we're actually doing something they'll start coming forward to us and then our numbers will increase and I'm

not terrified of increased numbers I think that's healthy. So sort of my way of saying if you see something really sketchy going on you think there's some code of conduct violation or somebody's about to burn down the hotel please don't just video it and put it on YouTube. Just I mean tell us about it and then post the video but give us a

chance to respond first. Someone added I mean I love that there's competing trackers to try to figure out. By show of hands how many people here are using the hacker tracker? Awesome. Okay how many people are trying the out out tell website where you can see the

whole entire schedule on one page? Not many people using out tell. You can do a CS I mean you can do a what is it a I Cal Cal DAB invite get it on your calendar and sync it with so there's these two giant scheduling platforms just to try to figure out how many talks we have. The last count we have almost 600. That's like five or six times yeah. So

when people say do you know what's going on? No I have no idea. I don't know what's going on. I mean we provide maybe 120 of those talks 140. The rest is all straight up from

villages and other. So that's what's so awesome about this community. We give you a little platform and next thing you know you've got a hundred talks and you know people ex ambassadors to the UN coming and talking about voting villages voting machines. So this is a formula we're going to stick with. Now going forward you

might have also noticed in the program I'm talking about this is our last year at Caesars. That doesn't mean burn down Caesars. That means leave it intact so the property will have us at other ones right? Ideally we would actually clean the

windows on the way out so they would be really impressed with us. So next year I'll talk about a closing ceremonies. We're going to switch hotels next year and when we switch we're hoping to get a little bit better layout and we're going to continue this large variety of villages. And the other thing is we're doing a little

creative destruction here. So if there's villages that you go to and they're absolutely like what's going on here this is a disaster let us know. And if there's villages you go to that you absolutely love let us know because we need to see who who can cut the mustard and keep giving the stage to the people are doing a good job and then give somebody a new chance if there's some

villages that aren't doing very well right? That's we want this kind of turmoil and churn in the villages so there's new stuff put on by people excited by it. Also I kind of want to I'm how do I do this how do I get your

opinion? Defcon is a hacker con. We try really hard to keep it hacker. It's not an infosec con right? And some people are confused about the difference sometimes I get confused on the difference but we're not sponsored we've never been sponsored. We try really hard to make the hacker mentality infused in

everything we do and that's really hard because there's so much money involved now. Everybody's got a career everybody's got a ladder they're climbing or a specialty and so when we think about what does it mean to be a hacker con versus infosec con the thing that really crystallized it for me was

about four or five years ago I was talking to a past CSO of Facebook they've gone through a number but past Facebook CSO and I said hey are you going to black hat? He said no I don't I don't send my people to black hat.

It's like what what are you talking about there's like all these incredible ninjas doing trainings and classes and he's like yeah but if I go to an infosec event I have people that are really good at one thing and I send them to a training and they get better they get like this much better or that much better and then I send them to a talk and they get this much better and they're taking their existing skills and they're getting a little

better it's like polishing the blade just a little bit more it's like I'm not interested in that I send everybody to Defcon because I need to teach my people how to think it's like you know how do you approach a problem how do you problem-solve how do I explore new concepts how do you just through the joy of discovery stumble into a room and learn a whole new thing

that excites you right and so that's a that joy of discovery that sort of accidental discovery that's something we're really trying hard to grow and so I don't know if that resonates with you but I see that as one big difference so

on an infosec time so thinking about that you know what is hacker and it's funny because it's changed over the years right in the early days we spent

so much I spent so much time half of my time was spent trying to figure out who to meet and what they knew and could they teach it to me and then I only have like 30% of my time actually doing the thing that I learned about because I had to burn all my energy on figuring out who knew what and could

they share it with me nowadays I think that's flipped you there's an unlimited number of things for you to learn and you have access to it on YouTube and on videos and conferences so you're not spending 40 50 percent of your time trying to figure out who knows what you can spend 80 percent of your time just doing the thing and it's almost like this embarrassment of riches

we have right now and so I'll get up and I'll look at the content it's a time management thing now for me it's like man I wish I had time for that I wish I had time for that wish I had time for that where before I wouldn't even know half of those things existed so we're in this land of plenty we're hackers and we want to tear it all apart and some people get to the

show and their heads explode because they're just overwhelmed with things to do it's like don't worry about it collect some cards talk to some people make some notes you'll have the whole rest of the year to get caught up on everything you saw here it's more important I think to make the

relationships and later on you can spend all your waking hours on the tech because I think ultimately hacking is really social and if you notice the badges for this year and almost all years when lost was creating them or Joe Grand was creating them when Joe first started doing some of our badges

we spent a lot of time talking about how do we use the badge as a tool to force people to actually be social because a lot of us aren't right we we kind of sometimes lack those skills but if we have an excuse a tech excuse hey it's not me man it's just the badge badges making me talk to you

you know I mean normally I'd never answer your call or your phone but you know badge is doing it so we spend a lot of time like how do we make the badge force you to interact and we've done it with wireless infrared and near field we've tried a lot of things this year you know you see the mating plug in 10 milliseconds or less so you don't have to spend too much time

talking to someone with the social game and that forces you to to sort of puzzle it out if we gave you all the rules and gave you all the how-tos it might not be as easy right it's still a hacking con you might notice there's a

serial port here you can get on and play the game that way as well so we put a lot of energy thinking into how to make things more social for you and to attendees that might just be sort of background noise but to us in the back end it's funny we obsess on these little things trying to figure out like

what you like and what don't you like that teaches you some skills so for example in the early years the reason we started hardware badges the reason I got Joe to do it is because I felt that people were losing hardware skills at that time everything was software hardware was like black magic voodoo and I was thinking if I was a real hacker I was like some Johnny mnemonic

you know I would be up in the hardware business right that's where all a lot of stuff happens but as hackers if we're gonna be the resistance we can't even connect to a console port so how do we get people interested in hardware

how do we get that going and it's been more than 10 years and now we have what over a hundred and something hardware badges this year at con over hundred different ones from one right people are not intimidated by hardware anymore people are having a lot of fun we can do this and so if I could plant

the seed and then the community just explodes like I have to tell you still to this day I know about this much about hardware but that doesn't mean I can't try to help foster it so this year is I want to introduce the toy makers who designed it they're gonna go through a little bit of the game try

not to give it all away and I'm also going to show you off this is the uber badge for this year and we talked a little bit about that the magic black ink that turned out to not be that magic and so this is what the winners of certain contests will get this year it's the admission for life for

Def Con if you if you earn you don't win it you earn it a black badge and so I'll be showing this off throughout the con and then we give away and announce the winners the only winners of contests that get black badges that know it are the capture the flag winners everybody else we really don't

reveal which contests will get it one in the past we did that people gamed it and everybody just only played on black badge events and it kind of hurt the other contests and then some of the contests that were knew they were black badge contests some of them just kind of rested and they didn't they didn't keep up their game because there wasn't a lot of

competition they just knew they had it and so once we made it a variable maybe you get it maybe you don't everybody started to up their game again so if you're wondering why am I wearing this little death skull this is because I've got the black badge I'm keeping it real here okay with that said I want to hand it over to Addie from the toy makers you have a

microphone you've got one she's got some slides she's gonna step through and then I think we're gonna have time do you want to do some Q&A at the end yeah guys yeah okay welcome to the DEFCON 26 official badge talk we're the

toy makers and the creators of this year's badge but before we get started

talking about the badge I wanted to make sure to give proper homage to those that came before us so to Joe Kingpin Grand who started these badges

with dark tangent for years 14 to 18 and Ryan lost boy Clark who did years 19 and 24 if we can give a rousing round of applause for their work all right so

who are we we are the toy makers the badge team this year consisted of a hardware engineer wire a software ninja who you can't see because she's a

into the infosec conference community by making badges for cyphercon which is an infosec con in Wisconsin so flyover state so some numbers this year we made twenty thousand two hundred twenty badges a lot and this

ranged all the way from twenty six thousand three hundred human badges to twenty-five coveted uber badges each badge had 91 components and so this led to me shepherding about 2.6 million different components through the system

there are 43 LEDs per badge with the RGB is broken out there and on the bottom right you'll see the total number of emails that were sent through the course of this process and if you are medically minded this is also the graph that shows my cortisol levels so just a little bit about the

background we were graciously graciously asked by dark tangent to do this very humbling to create this year's badge back in November and the

interesting thing about this timeline is that due to lead times we actually had to order parts before we could get a working prototype so thankfully the team got it right the first time and our prototype was completed in Maine

firmware completed in June now with the order this large when you need to program in 29,000 microcontrollers usually the easiest time to program these is as the chips are being manufactured and we just didn't have time to do that and so we asked a chip supplier to see if they could program

these chips for us they said sure no problem and they had six months essentially to figure out how to do this so fast forward to about three four weeks ago they they say hey we don't actually know how to program these

chips and they sent a screenshots of their programming machines to ask if we could tell them what check boxes to check in order to program the chips I

said thanks for nothing let's overnight these to our fab which they took five days to overnight yeah so thankfully the fab that we worked with amazing folks they hired some temp workers and so all the badges that you guys have on you have been hand programmed by those six temp workers

and of course it would not be a DEF CON badge if there weren't shipment

issues now they did get here on time which I hear is actually kind of rare but trade war caused a lot of problems so shipments that were supposed to take five days would take ten shipments that would be overnight would take five days overnight just really isn't a thing yeah but fortunately I got the

personal desk numbers of a couple of FedEx custom team members Thank You and they were able to help push these badges through and so our thanks to them

all right so the theme of the okay so the theme of DEF CON this year is 1983

which is in relation to the book 1984 written by George Orwell now if you've never read the book one you totally should very appropriate two it's concepts such as Big Brother thought crime perpetual war against the other come from really it essentially describes a society that is completely

counter to hacker ethics so in the book there are different ministries so the Ministry of Truth where see where it deals in revisionist history and changing what was true to match what the party now says is true the Ministry of

Plenty which rations food Ministry of Peace which is actually the war arm of the party Ministry of Love where if you don't love the party they'll torture you until you do and so fortunately we are time travelers here

welcome to the year 1983 this is the year where we still have time to make decisions that can change the future and avoid this Orwellian collapse and these decisions aren't made by people in ivory towers they're made by people like you and me it's about what we choose to do what we choose to accept

what we choose to ignore and this is these are decisions that we make in our everyday lives that impact what happens to us as a society so because these decisions are made by everyday us our design aesthetic overall is everyday

buildings for everyday people and everyday people have different stories so each type of badge human goon contest etc is a different interactive story you might start out as an employee a visitor a student etc and if

everyone if everyone would look at their badge you might notice that the DEFCON letters are lit red green lightish green or not at all these are reflective of the choices that have been made in your story and the

status of your puzzles so the letter N is what the sum of your choices have identified you as in other words your alignment where red stands for contributing to the rise of dystopian doom for shame and green is contributing

to a healthy hacker friendly future you'll also notice little people roaming on your badge so the green individual is you because we have high hopes the red one is your little goon and that's right this year at DEFCON everyone gets their own goon that you can stuff in your pocket so just as you

can make choices in your own story your little goon can also make choices in the story so if you prefer that your little goon makes the same choices as you would it would be in your best interest to find a big goon who has a

badge with an alignment which matches your alignment and connecting your badge to theirs will allow your little goon to inherit the alignment of big goon and just as that goons badge can affect your story based on the choices they've made the choices you've made in your own story can affect any of the

other badges you connect to and vice versa oh yeah this is a two-way street director all right so in order to get complete control of your

lights not only will your choices matter but you'll have to seek out others of every other badge type who've made good choices and or encourage them or convince them to make the right choices so a potential goal then a soft goal would be to get your DEFCON lights to be all the same color either

red or green so badge basics we wanted to make sure that the badge was immediately interactive so if you notice on the bottom of your badge there is a DEFCON symbol and 26 these are touch sensitive pads

corresponding to up down left right and plus and minus these work for moving your character around and for interacting with the puzzles at each position but because we know that sometimes capacitive work does about sorry capacitive touch doesn't always work in every environment and with

everybody's different fingers there's a micro USB connector at the bottom of the badge so this allows you to power the badge without batteries and also makes the game much much easier so just some basics once you plug the badge if you don't have the drivers and meaning to get microchip USB CDC

drivers it'll assign a com port to your badge you'll want to open up a serial terminal emulator for Windows we use putty Mac screen Android phones you can use serial USB terminal and you just want to make sure that to

access that you can you write the correct com port associated with your badge and to access the graphics you may want to turn on IBM code page 437 and all of this is so that you're able to access the ANSI version of the

badge so ANSI's use was used by artists in the text mode art scene on BBS's way back when and the artwork is 80 by columns wide by 80 rows tall and on your terminal screen you'll see about 80 by 25 so when you plug

it in get the serial terminal emulator up you'll see the following screen at least if you're a human and this is a screenshot of the garage in the human badge and you'll see that there's some story text on the bottom as well as

text based on the decisions you've made on the bottom left-hand side are the controls you can use which also show you what directions you're able to go so green for go red for no go white for that's not even an option the bottom right will then also show you what your Def Con letters are so since

these okay sorry so since these lights also reflect the status of your puzzles note that this badge has both software and hardware puzzles the main microcontroller on the badge is a pic 32 mm you can interface with it

using MP lab X and you can reprogram it using a picket three or four and hardware puzzles do exist so now that we've gotten through the meat of the

batch here are some side-by-side pictures of the badges and the drawings they were based off of I'll also point out some choice cool things that I am particularly fond of because I drew all right human badge you guys got the garage now the cool thing about this is you guys get a ramen shop

because who doesn't like ramen right we've got a nod to back to the future we've got a nod to metropolis and you also get a subway train in your basement press badge you guys get a broadcast station so one you get a

satellite dish that's the size of Montana and along the bottom the very bottom well first we put you in the basement of your company and along the bottom you'll notice that the technologies go from laptop to CRT to

typewriter to pen and paper and you get a photography room to goon badge this is a panopticon and this particular badge had maybe the most cyber punky graphics I would say you guys also get a lot of interrogation rooms contest

badge this is based off a library one who doesn't like libraries I love libraries there are multiple fireplaces and you get a pretty rockin

lounge in the basement as well the vendor badge this one is a factory and my favorite part about this is that there's a crane in the basement because I thought if I could put a create in a badge why not so there you

go speaker badge this is a theater there are performance theaters movie theaters and drive-in movie theaters and so oh and you also get like a rock concert hall so the artist badge this is based off a gallery there's a

gallery there's a performance hall and I even give a little nod to the dealing with all of the desiccated mummies and boxes and shipments in the basement and the CFP badge you may notice on the top there is

architecture from MIT we thought it would be pretty recognizable but below that there is an underground server room there are sewers and there's even a mine because apparently there are universities out there that have mines

in their school and so you have a stegosaurus fossil there too oh no but

before we do the things I wanted to make sure to get a few out PSAs out one please put the batteries in the correct way so we do have reverse

polarity protection so the badges that did get leaked on are actually perfectly fine as long as you clean them up but if you reverse even just one battery and we tested this if you reverse just one battery after about a half of an hour you will learn the wetware hacking part of our badge

please don't so what's going on here is to get the duration out of the battery pack to try and last the entire con without having to replace batteries we put a buck booster regulator on there so it will run from

six volts down to about two and a half if you put one battery in backwards you get plus one point five minus one point five from the battery that's backwards plus one point five plus one point five so you get three volts the badge is happy but that one battery that's backwards you're trying to charge it it doesn't get hot it actually just internally de-gases and

until the pressure builds up then you hear a pop which is kind of yeah I heard the pop it's kind of interesting actually the naoh that's in it is this

will make your skin feel kind of slippery and it's the same stuff that's in soap sure no the other thing is there have been some pretty awesome legends dropping around this badge which is totally fun to hear but you

can take the batteries out the game will restart where you are positionally but all of your linkages as well as your decisions will still remain so please if you need a sleep take the batteries out okay so finally we wanted to do our Oh total runtime is about 65 to 70

hours so get some sleep if you're putting the saos on oh that runtime will vary greatly it will not well I have not seen an add-on that make will make it run longer

so our thanks of course to e-tech net and their temp workers for again manually programming all these badges the fedex customs team our badge pimp Michael gets min and cyphercon for just introducing us to the rabbit hole of badges mar Williams for her art on the back if you get all the badges on

the in a row in the correct order you'll get a mini mural from Mar Joe grand for opening our eyes to the logistics issues involved in making this many badges and of course you guys for wearing the badges even though you're kind of forced to but also just you know being here being

defcon and so here's to an awesome conference and we hope you enjoyed the badge closing we are going to be releasing the source code if someone

else hasn't already released it and we'll see about this okay okay yeah

and we'll see about the schematics again if they're not already leaked but there are a number of places that I think people are working on these there's some impromptu badge hacking villages that have cropped up around the place a lot of some of the chill out rooms but there's a great article in hackaday by Mike stitch which shows kind of the basics of the

badge and I think reddit also has our Def Con also has some folks who are giving out hints but hopefully this helped clear up a few questions so let's see we've got five whole minutes let's do one or two Q&A quick who can never get to the

microphones this guy right here okay what do you got nobody he was walking past the microphone on the way out the door okay that explains that no questions great well in that case oh you have one question right here okay

and then we'll go run to the microphone run first Oh which CAD package was used to do the design pipe I can okay sir how much did it cost we don't know yet

partially because when you order this many batteries you get like thousands of pounds like tons of batteries and we got shipped half the number of batteries we needed so we get here and they're like hey we only have 56,000 batteries where are the other 56,000

batteries like well that's all we shipped so we had somebody that spent like 15 hours and in one day he found all the remaining batteries in California and Nevada and basically went to

fries and said I heard a rumor you've got 10,000 batteries sell them to me and so we know that that's about I think it was 10,000 batteries weighed 500 pounds in his trunk so yeah so we're still calculating the cost sir if you try to hack it and screw it up is there an

easy way to reset it so currently there is a way to reset it if you can find it it is not very it's intentionally not obvious I've seen one reddit post where someone got really

close but they haven't gotten in yet if you really get it screwed up just come find me and reprogram your badge and clear it out. Yeah that reminds me we this year we created a badge hacking area so it's near the hardware hacking village in the solder skills area it's just a big open area with a bunch of tables and power and it's just for people interested in

badges and engineering them and solving puzzles to go so we gave you a dedicated space this year okay last question to this gentleman in the white hat. Thank you we so we only just when you mentioned about the the allegiance with the green and the red we pretty much have all the badges we went around and met all the badges are we do we have to go re-align to

change the colors? Thank you. Yeah and on that happy note thank you everyone and see you at Def Con.