Welcome to Space Security Challenge 2020, HackASAT, the final event. As the democratization
of space opens up a new frontier for exploration and innovation, we see new cybersecurity
vulnerabilities emerging. The Space Security Challenge is designed to inspire the world's
top cybersecurity talent to develop the skills necessary to secure this last frontier of
cybersecurity, space. And already we've made a ton of progress. I'll catch you up. This
spring, we hosted over 2,000 teams who worked their way through a set of foundational space
cybersecurity challenges in our HackASAT qualification round. Now, eight finalist
teams are stepping up to the ultimate challenge. They are hacking a satellite.
Welcome to the first of two daily recaps for the Space Security Challenge 2020, or HackASAT.
I'm still your host, Jordan Wines. As our eight teams have been vying for a share of a $100,000
prize pool, we're going to check in and summarize the status of the day. Of course, they also
received $15,000 just to get here as a finalist. The competition for that was fierce. Our finalists
beat out over 2,000 other teams made up of over 6,000 other competitors. Of course, the biggest
prize of all might not even be the money or even the friends we made along the way, but the bragging
rights for your code to be selected to take an actual photograph of the moon from a satellite
in space. While this event was originally planned to be in person during DEF CON in the aerospace
village, the global pandemic has caused us to reimagine the event experience. The result is an
immersive 3D environment where you can stay up to date with the competition while learning all about
space security and the event itself. You can connect with other spectators and even play games
and add to our graffiti wall. So if you aren't already watching this from our immersive 3D
environment, check it out at virtual.hackasat.com. As prior DEF CON attendees, some of you are very
familiar with the many flavors of contests that test your hacking skills. But for others, we
realize this is a whole new world. There are many types of hacking contests and Hackasat falls
into the category of capture the flag or CTF. Remember the game you played as a kid with flags
hidden in opponent's terrain? Now imagine the field or code and the flags are secret data.
Players exploit security flaws to capture the flags while at the same time defending their
networks from opposing teams. These capture the flag CTF events are as diverse as the teams that
play them. This is a global competitive community with thousands of players and global rankings.
It's been a part of the origin story for a great many prominent security experts. So what do these
hacking games look like? CTFs can be either in person or online and usually take place over a
weekend or other short period. They often have a qualification round that determines who gets to
participate in the finals. CTFs are sometimes themed around a specific domain like space for
but more commonly they are not specialized and include a wide variety of different types of
challenges. The most common types of CTFs include Jeopardy CTFs, sometimes called red team CTFs,
are named for their use of the classic game board as a scoreboard. These are more offensive focused.
Each team is given infrastructure to attack and the number of successful attacks, the difficulty,
or the speed at which they succeed is factored into their score. Attack defense, A slash D,
full spectrum CTFs, which are closer to the original game you might have played as a kid.
Each team has a server or set of servers to defend and must attack other teams while also protecting
their own infrastructure. Key of the Hill style CTFs are full spectrum CTFs in which teams score
points by gaining and maintaining control of individual systems. And finally, the less common
blue team exercises, which are primarily defensive events. Game organizers host an environment and
often a professional team of attackers to test the participants defensive skills.
These are more common in the high school and collegiate level. How do you win?
Even though the goal of the CTFs are to find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems,
fair play is essential. There are lots of ways to win, but to get the respect of your peers,
you need to have good technical solutions. Nobody is impressed if you use a network flood to knock
the scoreboard offline and those kinds of shenanigans will get you shunned quickly.
The best CTF players have built specialized tools, practice within their domains and include
domain experts in many aspects of security. Why CTF? At their core, CTF challenges are a way for
hackers to build community and demonstrate and hone their skills with other equally skilled
people. Competitions are also a chance to experience the joy of learning about a new
programming language or a new piece of technology hackers haven't used before. Capture the Flag
challenges have also been used to help train cybersecurity teams and to get new hackers
interested in security research. Some companies even use competitions similar to CTFs to recruit
and vet potential candidates for employment. And CTFs have had real-world impact with competitors
finding actual security flaws in contest infrastructure. Their solutions, while not
counting towards winning the game, are often implemented in a real-world context. With
HackASAT, we have a CTF game designed to raise awareness about cybersecurity issues in space
and help researchers develop specific skills and domain knowledge they'll need to help secure this
new frontier. But as many of the players during our quals round found out, there are a lot of
problems unique to the environments outside our atmosphere. To learn more about hacking in space,
check out our Space Talk videos that explain some of the most interesting space-specific challenges.
For more on CTFs and other hacking and space-related topics, go to the research room in the virtual
environment or check out the related YouTube playlist. Okay, let's go ahead and recap the whole
day so far. The game has actually been underway for one hour now, and our team's first challenge
has been to regain control of the ground station that they'll be using to communicate with their
Flatsats. In fact, just before this broadcast went live, we received word that this challenge
was actually solved by Team Samurai. Congratulations to them! Right after our last update ended with
only a Samurai solve, several other teams came in with solutions for Challenge Zero.
PFS and Solarwine were solvers 2 and 3 on that challenge. After those two teams scored on
Challenge Zero, every other team was eventually able to solve Challenge Zero over the next several
hours. Taking a look at the scoreboard so far, we've had an eventful last hour. Our teams continue
to make progress, with four teams now having solved Challenge One. Unfortunately, the window
of time after first solve has expired, and the remaining four teams were given a solution with
no points. PFS and Colon Can Into Space were joined by 1553 and 1064 Seabred with solutions for
Challenge One. Now, this was going to be where I signed off with this update, but as we were live,
PFS actually jumped up on the scoreboard yet again, solving Challenge Two.
You may have noticed that first blood overlay and sound effect in that summary. While it was
originally used in Unreal Tournament to indicate a kill, the phrase and even sometimes the sound
effects are often used in CTF competitions to indicate the first team to solve a particular
challenge. The challenges that teams have solved so far include a Challenge Zero, which required
exploiting an insecure web application to steal credentials for the ground station controller,
and then using that Cosmos ground station, the teams had to restore communication
with their flatsats as they were tumbling and not communicating well.
The Challenge One involved connecting to the ground station, turning up the power,
turning down the bandwidth, which is very much a real-world troubleshooting step.
Next, the teams have to restore proper orientation control over their flatsat,
but only one team so far has managed to accomplish this feat. That brings us to what's happened in
the last two hours of the competition. Most teams are now working on two or three challenges,
the On-Orbit Challenge, Challenge Two, and Challenge Three.
PFS has been pulling away to a healthy lead that is going to be hard to catch up to tomorrow.
Hard, but definitely not impossible. All it takes is for them to get stuck in a problem and be passed
in turn, much like they did to Samurai at the start of the game. It's also interesting to note
that PFS, which is actually short for Pwn First Search and Pull in Can Into Space, are number one
and number two on the leaderboard, are two of the smallest teams in the competition. Having a large
team is sometimes an advantage, but it definitely comes with logistical issues, and in this case,
where the challenges are serial in nature, it isn't always helpful. Let's take a look again
at the PFS team bio. If you were here with us live, you might remember that right in the middle
of teams working on their challenges at around 12 p.m pacific, all teams had to stop what they
were doing and shift focus to the on-orbit challenge. Stop everything and look up. Starting
now, teams shift to the on-orbit challenge. Their primary goal is to capture a picture of the moon
using the satellite. Competitors will have access to the two-line element of the vehicle
and the camera's foresight vector. Each team is tasked with creating a mission plan that
transitions a satellite from a tumbling state to one where it points the camera at the moon.
The team will reach a successful status once their resulting mission plan meets key criteria.
1. The commands are generated in the correct order and are within the specified period.
2. The image capture angle of the moon is within specifications.
3. The team's negative z-axis is pointed as close to the earth's center as possible
without affecting the camera-to-moon pointing error.
4. The teams are given a command dictionary with the format for submitting the commands
and parameters. The rest is up to them. Of course, while PFS is currently in the lead,
they still have a critical problem to solve, specifically the on-orbit challenge. While
Poland Cannon to Space is only nipping at their heels at number two on the scoreboard,
they are critically not only the first team with an attempted solution to their on-orbit challenge,
but the first with an accepted solution. That would mean that they would be able to pass PFS
if PFS is not able to actually solve, because again, that is a pass-fail challenge, and it
will be critical to see what happens in the last few minutes of gameplay today, as well as tomorrow
in the on-orbit challenge. Now that the day is wrapping up, hopefully some of the organizers
have a little bit more time, so we're going to see if we can bring into video chat Vito Genovese,
who many of you may recognize from his time as a member of LegitBS, the team that organized the
DEFCON CTF for five years prior to the current organizers, The Order of the Overflow. Vito is
also currently with Chromulence, the creators of the flatsats and many of the challenges in Hackasat.
Vito, can you hear me? Are you there? Yes, loud and clear. Good evening. Excellent. Glad we got
you. Thanks for stopping by. I know you guys have been very, very busy kind of manning the systems
and talking to the teams. How's the game going so far? It's been going. We've kind of had some,
the flatsats are small run hardware, which always has issues, but we're super, super thankful the
teams are being patient with us and they're putting up a good fight and making really,
really good progress in the game. Is this pacing what you expected? Speaking of how they're kind
of doing, is this about where you thought they would be or you wanted them to be or how does
this fit with your expectations? It's really hard to set expectations for these games. A lot of it
is, you know, throwing stuff around. We can't even be in the same room doodling on a whiteboard
while we do it. So, you know, the expectations are not necessarily what's been happening,
but we'll survive. It's a difficult game and, you know, we'll see what happens tomorrow.
And it, I mean, it does seem like that if they're made good progress up to here,
they could have been a lot further behind. It would be nice to see them maybe a challenge ahead,
but this is certainly within reach, right? Like there's nothing kind of too crazy about what they
have remaining. This could be doable. And these, we know these are good teams that are capable of
more, it seems like, right? Right, yeah, absolutely. The, you know, challenges zero, challenges one,
they're hard challenges and the teams that took time on them, they still took time on them. They
did make progress and they did get through eventually. It's, you know, admirable work and
it's, you know, it's a difficult time for everybody involved. Now, do you miss actually being in Vegas
and going to DEF CON or you actually kind of prefer being remote? What's your take on that?
Absolutely miss it. You know, my, my favorite restaurant in Vegas, I miss, or my favorite
restaurants plural in Vegas. I miss that. I miss seeing my friends. I miss wearing my, you know,
special DEF CON shoes, which are behind me on the shelf. They're not in frame yet, but you know,
it's, it's better than getting really, really sick, I guess.
Given the alternative. Yeah. We're all kind of doing what, doing what we can and should there.
In fact, even you were originally supposed to be on stream with me and we just thought for,
that we would, we would do this via zoom and we'd be able to work it out that way. So thanks for,
for doing that. Tell me a little bit more about the rationale behind the scoring algorithm
and the game design, this, this decay and the kind of the grace window, what,
what design constraints went into that, that decision?
Okay. So the main design constraint with this is it's a very linear catch the flag game.
So what's, what has to happen is we're trying to get teams to take over this,
regain control of this, you know, tumbling satellite lost in space.
And that is a complicated operation. And instead of just having, you know, one single,
you know, you get this chunk of points, if you win the game, we split it up into different
little gates that teams have to pass through. So, you know, challenge zero or the first gate
is getting control of the, of a machine in the ground station. Challenge one after that
is being able to actually talk and receive messages with the satellite.
So we had to split this up in order to keep, you know, make the game actually have points
before you get to the end. And at the same time, in order to make the points actually meaningful,
we wanted to make sure there was some time pressure for teams to go quickly
and make progress throughout the whole weekend. So we have this kind of decay system implemented.
So each challenge is worth a fixed number of points at the beginning.
And as soon as the team solves it the first time, the clock starts ticking.
So within that first 30 minutes, anybody else who solves that challenge is also going to get
the full points. For challenge zero, that would be 50 points. For challenge two, or for challenge one,
that was 200 points. Beyond that, after that first 30 minutes, we have another two-hour interval
where that point amount starts gradually ticking down towards zero. Once it's hit zero, we don't
award points for it. And at that point, it also means that we share hints to, you know, nudge
teams along to get them to the next phase of the competition. And that's one of the advantages,
I think, is that, you know, a team, if they happen to get stuck on one particular problem,
in a serial event in particular, there's just not much you can do, in fairness to the other teams,
in terms of, you know, kind of, you don't want to give a team a hint just because they're behind,
because that actually hurts them. But by having the score drop off in a point at which they have
to be done or else they're just given a hint, well, then they've lost all the points for it.
And so it keeps them up with the game while not punishing the teams that do well. So that
makes a lot of sense. If you had a favorite challenge, what's the number? And if it's one we
haven't seen yet, like, no spoilers, of course, but what do you like best? So it's honestly, for me,
it's probably challenge one, which is kind of where the game starts to diverge from a normal
capture the flag contest. With challenge zero, we had a web app that teams had to,
I think, determine a cookie secret in. And that's very...
Challenge one is where we start to diverge. That's where we have to, once we've gotten
into the ground station and are able to talk to the, you know, satellite control system Cosmos,
that's where teams have to figure out how to turn telemetry on on the satellite,
because it's not, you know, just another machine on the network with an IP address,
and where teams have to figure out how to tell the satellite's radio to configure itself in a way
that it's actually functional for the rest of the game, for sending messages back and forth.
I saw a great quote go over the team communication channel from the organizers that said,
these are not like traditional network devices. And if you think sending, you know, two requests
a second, you know, will get you more reliability the way you would in a normal network,
that may be counterproductive here, which I thought was a great kind of nod towards the,
yeah, there's some different constraints and different concerns that maybe, you know, are
not the folks first instincts are accurate on, given the environment. So that makes a lot of
sense. Yeah, absolutely. It's a satellite is, in some senses, it is, you know, still a computer.
But the problem is, is it's a computer that costs millions and millions of dollars to,
you know, install and it costs, you know, billions of...
No, I think we might've lost you a little bit there for some network. Oh, you're back now.
Go ahead. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It costs, you know, millions to, you know, put it in place in the
first place. And it costs billions to send somebody up there to push a button to restart it.
Beyond that, it's, you know, a computer that you only talk to an RF and it's moving in a way that
whatever you can see it, you can probably talk to it, but there's a lot of time from any given
ground station where you can't see it at all. And that's a very unique challenge.
Vito, thank you very much for both your work on the game and for taking some time to talk to us
tonight. Look forward to seeing how the teams do tomorrow and look forward to talking to some more
as we see their progress. Excellent. Thanks. Take care. Take care. That's it for this first day of
the Space Security Challenge 2020 or HackASET final event. Overnight, we'll be taking our
FlatSats offline so they can get a good rest, aka, have their batteries charged, and so the
competition organizers can recharge their batteries, aka, have a good night's rest. Of
course, in addition to sleep, the teams will need to continue working on some of the components
in between game shutdown and game start tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Pacific and 10 a.m. Eastern.
They've actually been given a firmware image that will help them for the upcoming Challenge 3.
Thanks for spending your day with us. Make sure to check out the rest of what's happening at
DEFCON, the Aerospace Village, and our Aerospace Workshops. And I look forward to seeing you all
tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. Pacific, 12 p.m. Eastern for our next game update.