The whole of information/cyber security is founded on the idea that we can defend ourselves into security. But in the history of competitive endeavours nobody has won by playing defence alone. We have this idea that we can wrap our users and systems in enough padding to protect them in a world where guns exist. We’ve leaned so hard into this idea that we’re on the floor and it’s time to look up.
Arguably one of the largest hacking conferences in South Africa, BSides Cape Town 2023 is around the corner and the SensePost Team is there with a jam packed agenda demonstrating our latest research (with five talks), challenges and more! In this post, I’ll summarise what you can expect. For timing related information, check out the schedule here. Be sure to come and say hi at our stand in the chill area too.
In this post I want to talk a little about the BSides Cape Town 17 RFCat challenge and how I went about trying to build a challenge for it. Unfortunately I was not able to able to attend the con itself, but still had the privilege to contribute in some way!
The first question you may have could be: “But why RFCat?”. Truthfully, some people that are way better at this hacking thing than me (and that were also primarily responsible for this years BSides badge hardware) came up with this idea: “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a cc1111 chip on the badges?”. The cc1111 chip is RFCat compatible, so naturally this would be the goto firmware to use for the chip. With this in mind, I got invited by @elasticninja to see if I would be interested in building an RFCat based challenge and without hesitation agreed! So there we were.