Good morning, everyone.
You're all really asleep still.
Let's try that again.
Good morning, everyone.
All right, that's better.
Welcome to Roots.
This is the seventh annual.
Seven years.
Now, at one time, DEF CON, the main event out there, was this small.
It was actually smaller.
It started with 13 people.
So, you can imagine, one day, Roots will also be as big as DEF CON out there.
So, you guys are really the founding, the beginning generations of this.
So, have any of you been here for all seven?
Anyone?
Raise your hand.
A few.
A few of you.
All right.
And how many of you, is this your first time to Roots?
All right.
Wow.
Welcome.
And did anyone travel from outside of the United States to get here?
Anyone?
Wow.
All right.
Welcome, you guys.
Thanks so much.
So, we like to, we're really proud about Roots because we think it's one of the most diverse
technology programs in the world, if you look around the room.
So, how many of you identify with being a boy?
Raise your hand.
Raise it high.
All right.
And how many of you identify with being a girl?
Yeah.
So, we're about almost equal here again this year.
It's really unique.
Thanks, everyone, so much for coming.
We have a great lineup today.
I'm going to teach you lots of different types of hacking.
And along those lines, I've got Kurt here with us from the EFF.
Because what's really important to remember is the honor code.
So, Kurt's going to talk a little bit about the honor code with learning how to hack and
how to keep everyone out of trouble here.
So, I'll let Kurt come up.
All right.
Thank you.
Thank you, everybody.
It's so great to be back here.
Thank you.
And, you know, I've come here, you know, since the beginning of Roots.
And it's just great to see more and more people each year doing awesome and cool things.
What is really awesome about this is that you're out here, you're learning that the
world presented to you is not the world that you have to live in, that you can take something
apart, see how it works, put it back together again, that a lock is maybe a delay but not
a barrier.
So, you can do all sorts of things.
You're learning superpowers here.
But part of that, as well, is with great power comes great responsibility.
And so, we're trying to teach people not only to do these things but to do it for good and try
and make the world a better place.
That's what I try and do.
I work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
It's a nonprofit civil, thank you, nonprofit civil liberties organization.
And we try to help the people in the security research community be able to do their research,
figure things out, find out about vulnerabilities, disclose them, all without getting into trouble
so they can get out of trouble.
They can use their powers for good.
So, yeah, I want to talk a little bit about the honor code here.
So, we have a, it's a pretty short, simple one.
You can see it over on the sign there.
And, you want to pull that up here?
We've got the honor code.
So, it's about remembering the values.
Do not hack anything you need.
Okay, that's a good one because you might break it, you know.
If you take something apart, sometimes it doesn't go back together again very well.
You'll learn something in the process.
It's a cool thing to do.
Even if it doesn't work.
It doesn't end up working, but you might break it.
Respect the rights of others.
That's something you should do throughout your lives, but especially in the hacking
context.
So, you can hack on your own things.
You can ask somebody if you can hack on their things, but don't just hack on somebody's
things without asking them, without being cool about it.
Know the law and the consequences.
Well, there's a lot of laws out there about hacking.
This is a lot of what we do at EFF is advise them about the laws.
But, a lot of it boils down to putting law around some of these concepts, doing things
with permission, doing things that are breaking things that you own or that you have permission
of the owner on.
Find a safe playground.
Well, you're in one.
This is a great safe playground.
You can learn these things with excellent advice.
You can learn how to solder.
You can learn how to capture the flag.
And this is a safe space to do it.
You can make some mistakes and learn from them.
And then you can take these skills out there and use them to make a better world.
Oh, and only do good.
Of course.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Thank you, Curt.
So, if anyone has any more questions about legalities of what you're doing, the EFF has
a booth in the vendor area and Curt will also be around here and we're happy to answer any
questions for you.
It's really the only way you'll know.
But everything we're doing in here is legal already.
So, you don't have to worry about any of the workstations or anything like that.
One other rule is don't take pictures of anyone.
Okay?
So, is it okay if I take a selfie?
I have a picture with all you guys.
Is that okay?
Can I do that?
All right.
With York and I, this is my co-founder, York, here.
So, we're going to do a selfie here.
All right.
Can I take one picture of all you guys now?
Awesome.
What a great group.
So, that's what you do.
You always ask and then if someone doesn't want a picture taken, you just put your head
down.
Okay?
All right.
So, with that, did you not put your head down?
You said no, but did you put your head down?
Okay.
I'm going to erase the picture.
Okay.
So, let's do that again.
So, if you don't want to be in the picture, then I deleted it.
Okay?
Okay.
So, if you don't want to be in the picture, then just turn the other way.
Or, like, you've got a hat on.
I wear sunglasses to stay out of pictures myself.
Okay.
So, we're going to try it again right now.
Oh, it's letting me do it again.
All right.
I'm going to do a pano.
I'll do that.
All right.
Thank you, everybody.
And with that, I would like to introduce my very hardworking co-founder, York.
Hey, guys.
So good to see familiar faces.
It's even more exciting to see new faces.
You guys are going to learn and have so much fun.
Remember, respect each other.
Teach each other.
Right?
That's why we're here, and that's why we love running Roots, because everybody teaches each
other.
Just really quickly, we're going to have some talks in the morning, right, for the first
hour and a half or so, and then we're going to do all workstations this afternoon, so
you won't have to listen to anybody talking to you.
I want to really give a big shout out to our sponsors.
Without them, we couldn't do this.
So AT&T, who's in the corner, thank you so much for everything you've done.
They've been with us since the beginning.
Huge shout out to Facebook, who's running the Capture the Flag event.
Thank you, Facebook, so much.
We also have Logitech, who's going to be giving everybody a free web camera.
They're going to teach us how to hack it, so thank you, Logitech.
Big thank you to Wicker.
There's no one here.
Well, she's kind of here, so thank you, Nico and Wicker, and also All Clear ID, who's been
with us since the very beginning.
So we appreciate all the sponsors, and thanks again, everybody, for showing up.
And with that, I believe the first talk is Lauren.
All right, so we've got a new Master of Ceremonies this year that will be taking the stage over
from now on and introducing all the speakers, Lauren.
Our first talk will be by AltaVault.com.
We're going to start with Lauren, who's going to show us how to hack on the Roots badge.
And Eric.
Hi, I'm AltaVault.
This year, we are doing the soldering and coating stations over there.
So you'll get to solder the Roots Black Badge, and what this is, is after you're done soldering
this, you can play Paper, Rock, Scissors, but what's cooler is that you can actually
hack with these.
So we have a coating station where you can actually learn how to hack TVs, to, you know,
actually putting a piezo element on there to make sounds.
It's a great prank to actually set this in someone's, like, under their bed, so when
they're trying to sleep, it'll beep and it'll bug them.
So there's a lot of fun things you can do with these.
We're also giving out prizes for the top winners, so if you're hacking these badges and have
a lot of fun with it, you could try to get as much points as possible to win prizes every
day.
Good morning, everyone.
Good morning, everyone.
I'm also known as Stainless Steel Rat.
I'll be one of the people working the soldering station.
We're going to ask for your patience with us as we get things up and running.
We have about 16 soldering stations.
We are asking that today you only solder your badges.
We only have a couple of things to do to get you up and running with your badge, but we
want to get everyone up and running with their badges so they can begin to program them and
hack them, and then tomorrow we're going to do more other things other than just the badges.
So again, today we'd like to just get only badges.
If you get other projects from one of the other vendors here, that's great, but please
wait until Sunday, Saturday or Sunday to do that.
Other than that, is there anything else?
And also in the coding section, we do have labs on how to do brute forcing, so definitely
check out all of the fun labs that we have.
Thanks, guys.