Welcome to the awards ceremony for the Space Security Challenge 2020, or HACCASAT.
I'm your host, Jordan Wines.
Instead of teasing you like last time, let's get right to the results.
We closed the scoreboard yesterday, just before the game's end,
and there were multiple solves that occurred after the scoreboard went dark.
How did that impact the rankings?
Our top three winners of prizes are...
Congratulations to our top prize winning teams,
PFS for taking home the $50,000 grand prize,
Poland Can Into Space, who definitely can, for their $30,000 prize,
and hopefully an epic moonshot we'll see later in the broadcast,
and Flux Repeat Rocket for their $20,000 prize.
We know the technical challenges these teams faced in this event
were unlike any they've seen before,
and we're glad to be able to reward them with hard-earned prizes for their efforts.
However, as you may remember,
the on-orbit section was one of the most important goals of the competition.
It's one of the things that made this event special.
We needed a way to incentivize teams,
and making the on-orbit challenge pass or fail for prize eligibility
was one of the most effective ways to do that.
Space is unique. No one person is an expert in all of its aspects.
We wanted to ensure that the CTF and hacking community
grew in their capabilities relevant to space.
The on-orbit portion required an expertise in math that is unique.
Of course, this being in 2020, our worst fears came to reality.
The highest scoring team was one of those impacted negatively
by not having an on-orbit solution in time.
Let's take a look at the final scoreboard.
And you can see those scores that I mentioned
occurring after the scoreboard went dark.
They were by SolarWine, one of two teams that did not have
an accepted solution for the on-orbit challenge.
And thus, unfortunately, they're ineligible for the final prize pool.
However, the HackASAT organizers all feel for the impact
that this had on SolarWine, and we hope they can take pride
in several notable accomplishments.
First, while there has not been an announced HackASAT 2 edition,
I would personally expect that if such an event occurred,
much in the DEFCON CTF tradition,
the highest scoring team from the previous finals
would automatically qualify for the next event.
And that would be SolarWine.
Second, the official scoreboard submitted to CTF Time
will reflect the points total at the end of the game.
As on-orbit was merely for prize eligibility,
we expect it will not impact standings on CTF Time.
Finally, I want to describe some of the drama
that happened at the end of the day yesterday.
Most teams were running low on power
and needed to be taken off the carousel.
SolarWine was one of only two teams that stayed online
and they were able to capitalize on it.
Not only did they successfully solve Challenge 4,
which required a ton of work building a custom bootloader
to re-enable GPIO on the payload module,
but additionally, they blazed ahead and solved Challenge 5
just before the competition closed as well.
Now there were two ways to solve in Challenge 5.
A lower scoring option of just taking any photo,
and a higher scoring option of taking a photo of the moon in the room.
SolarWine quickly snapped a photo to prove they could control a camera,
and they tried to properly orient for a different photo.
They don't even know it, but their last commands
relayed to the satellite two minutes before the game ended,
took a photo that they never got to see as the game ended,
and we're going to show it to them now.
As you can see, the moon is visible there on the left,
just to the right of the logos.
So, while they did not successfully get this final photo
back in time before the game ended,
they now know that they did achieve success
in all of the Earth-based goals that we laid out for them.
Thanks again, SolarWine, for pushing so hard,
continuing through the discouraging result of yesterday.
And, of course, speaking of that on-orbit challenge,
I know we are all, and especially Poland Canada Space,
looking forward to seeing the results.
For that, we're going to go to Dr. Roper and Brett,
whom you will remember from their keynote earlier in the event.
Dr. Roper is the Air Force and Space Force Acquisition Chief,
and Mr. Brett Goldstein is the Director of the Defense Digital Service.
Gentlemen, can you hear me?
Yes, we can, Jordan.
You can hear me, and I can hear you. That's the important part.
Take it away.
Awesome. Jordan, thanks so much to you and the entire team
that worked so hard to put on this event
and keep everything moderated.
And just a huge hats off to everyone who has participated
in this inaugural foray of space into DEF CON.
And Brett and I were talking earlier.
We are just blown away by how far the community
has come in just a few short weeks.
We've made our own progress here.
We have solved the lanyard challenge.
So by just merely taking off the case,
you can actually attach this.
So problem solved.
But the progress that has been made by these teams
is much more impressive.
And what I just left away is that this combination
of needing to know orbital mechanics,
antenna physics, as well as just good, solid hacking skills
is going to create some of the most interesting challenges
for future DEF CONs to come.
Brett, what do you think?
So my big question is,
is this the second episode of Between Two Nerds?
Part five.
Part five.
Or do you think we'll get syndicated?
Maybe.
Zombies in space, we're ahead of the game.
We are.
And as I think about my future in DOD,
I'm also thinking about my future in TV.
Or this could be Meet the Nerds.
There's a lot of potential here.
We'll hold on to our day jobs, though.
Okay.
Well, I just feel like I'm getting a lot of encouragement
to get into this realm.
But anyhow, so DEF CON has been awesome.
So for everyone listening out there,
great, great year.
And I think about last year,
and I think about all that we did
when Will and I went for the first time,
and the fact that we got DOD out there.
And so proud.
And a couple things stand out for me.
But one of them's funny.
So I had never been on Discord before.
And y'all may be using Discord all the time,
but isn't there something counterintuitive
about you log on to Discord,
and then it sends you this random-ass link
that you're supposed to click?
Like, this is DEF CON.
So super surprised by that.
So I had to call up my friend Roro,
and I'm like, hey dude, do I click the link?
And he's like, well, I guess so. Click.
So hopefully that wasn't a bad click.
But on a more serious note,
what was really special about our efforts
with Air Force and DDS is,
in our first day of doing everything,
we had more traffic and more interactions
than we did through the entire DEF CON last year.
Which is insane, because, like,
for all the folks from the team
who did DEF CON last year, we were slammed.
So the fact that we saw those sorts of interactions
means we really got our act together this year.
Virtual was awesome for us,
and we're glad we were able to engage.
But Will, Hackisfat, what do you think?
Well, Brett, amazing success.
Amazing the amount of community that was able to be involved.
And the feedback has been fantastic.
Overwhelmingly, people saying,
I never knew that space was really accessible to me.
Were the equipments affordable, given my day job?
And that's amazing to introduce that to this community.
So we had over, almost 13,000 people
came to the Hackisfat website this year.
Almost 5,000 people came in through the VR site.
And over 130,000 social media views,
which just tells me space is super interesting
and something that's just been beyond grasp
and hopefully seems a little more so now.
And for the teams that were part of our quals,
we were super excited in your interest.
And for the teams who made it in the final,
we're blown away by how quickly you adapted
to these very difficult challenges.
And I think we picked them right.
They were solvable, but not easily so.
And so to everyone involved, hats off.
And especially just want to give a shout out to SolarWind,
the top overall score.
I mean, kudos to you for sticking at it,
for coming back and continuing to improve what you did.
For PFS, congratulations on being the top winner.
And again, just putting a lot of amazing solutions on the board.
And Poland can into space.
You stated your goal was to get into space,
and you did with your moonshot that we'll come to in a second.
And I don't want to leave Flux Repeat Rocket out.
Coming in, getting that 20K prize,
putting up amazing tech across all these different challenges.
We're just really proud of all of you.
But what we wanted to end with is the Cyber Moonshot,
which was more than just the name.
Taking control of the satellite that is orbiting,
having to restore normal operations after they've been disabled,
having to understand orbital mechanics well enough
to point a satellite that's meant to take a picture of the Earth
to something that's 385,000 kilometers away
and successfully get an image through what is very much a soda straw
is a wicked hard challenge.
But DEFCON and our first satellite, HackASAT Challenge,
needed no less than that.
And so I am pleased to announce that Poland can into space.
You can. Let's roll the video for your Cyber Moonshot.
All right, on screen is the Moonshot for everyone to see.
All right, back to you, Brett and Dr. Roper.
I think that video gives you a sense about how hard this challenge was.
So for Poland can into space, how awesome is that?
We're super proud of what you and what every participant accomplished
this week in HackASAT and the Moonshot Challenge itself.
Brett, that wasn't all that was going on in the aerospace village
and particularly components dealing with space.
True, but before we go there, so orbital mechanics.
So if you were to define orbital mechanics,
what would you say, asking for a friend?
You're going to need a basic knowledge of Kepler's laws of motion.
Everything's moving around in either an ellipse, a circle, a parabola,
or a hyperbola, or a line, I guess, technically, to give the degenerate case.
So you need to know that stuff. You need to be able to model it numerically.
And you also need to understand how to transpose different reference frames.
So other than that, Brett, it's just simple math.
Kepler, degenerate, parabola. Got it.
All good. Kepler's your friend in space.
Got it. Okay. Kepler. Got it.
So workshops. So workshops were awesome this year.
And before we dive into some stats, I want to thank the team.
So the DDS team with our Air Force friends,
they work night and day to make all of these streams happen.
And all of the mechanics probably involved a little Kepler, parabola, lines, math,
to make all of these different workshops happen on the Twitches.
But in all seriousness, the team has been surging for months
to make each one of these as real as possible, to keep it up, work the challenges,
deal with drama up until the last minute. So amazing work.
But we had 11 Twitch streams, and that was awesome from an educational point of view.
But here's a big, big piece.
Our first winner on all of the workshops was a 12-year-old.
The Alpaca Club.
So this 12-year-old out of nowhere came and crushed one of the workshops.
And something as both as a dad, but also as a director of an innovation team,
and then looking to one of our goals of training the future,
a 12-year-old, again, the Alpaca Club, going and crushing it right off the bat was amazing.
So we have these workshops.
And from a traffic perspective,
we're looking at we had over almost 2,500 visitors and 131 winners.
And that is pretty impressive.
But the good news for everyone listening out there is we're still playing today.
So and because everyone likes swag, keep playing.
You win a shirt. You win. You win a shirt.
Swag wins.
But these workshops were great.
And one of the goals that Will and I had from the very beginning was have a very hard challenge like HackASet,
where people would, you know, start and then it would get to a series of teams and get to the big win, the moonshot.
But we also want to work on training folks with everything from advanced to beginner level types of workshops.
And I feel like we were able to deliver there.
But it was pretty awesome.
I don't know if you won yet, Will.
Well, I think everyone won for this.
You know, it's pretty amazing to see how far just members of our military have come from just a year ago.
So we were there a little over a year ago with an F-15 hacking challenge.
And it really did send a shock across the Pentagon with, wait a second, what are we doing?
You know, cyber vulnerabilities are not things that we're supposed to expose.
And I've seen a huge amount of progress for the organizations I represent, the Air Force and the Space Force,
starting to realize that this community is one that we should have been a part of a long time ago,
that we have so much to learn from you, and we have learned this week.
And I'm looking forward to doing some debriefs with the teams and just hearing how you approach the challenges
and what you think we can do better on, because we're designing satellites and airplanes every day, Brad.
And these lessons we can put directly into new things that we design.
We'd also like to hear how we can be better members of this community, because we're going to be back next year
and we can do virtual events, we can do live hacking events.
We want to know how we can make interesting opportunities relevant to our mission,
something that really energizes this community where everyone learns.
So Brad, I think we all won with PAKASAT this year.
I think we did too. And so the past two nights, we've done this drinks with devs, which has been pretty wild,
because we just had a horde of our folks and then a bunch of people who have been working on the workshops came in.
And the good news from last night is we had a winner for DDSAT.
So Pina Triste, amazing work, good job, came on the call last night, got the kudos there.
So we've seen winners throughout the stack. I think this year really went well.
The question is, what do we do next year?
Well, Brad, I have my own ideas and we'll be discussing them for sure.
We could go into AI, we could go into drones.
We could let members of the community make a satellite that we could put up in orbit
and maybe you've designed it more cyber secure than the way we do.
But we want to hear from you.
No, we should have been part of this community a long time ago.
And I hope that you'll tell us how we can use opportunities like this
so that having military members be part of the DEF CON community is not an unusual thing, but a really cool thing.
So we're going to keep the websites open and we hope that you will share your thoughts with us
so that this time next year, hopefully when COVID-19 is behind us and I hope everyone is safe till then,
that we can do a live event that's awesome,
but continue all the awesomeness that this virtual event has afforded.
We've had so many more people participate.
And Brad, I don't know, maybe we can talk about zombies again next year.
We could have a zombie challenge.
If you can incorporate zombies into the challenge, I think you win.
Because let's face it, Brad, after zombies run over the earth,
we may be reliant on members of this community to download critical satellite data to know where they are.
I think we've uncovered something critical.
But in all seriousness, even though everything does in fact come back to zombies,
we want to hear from you.
So we have ideas on what is hard.
So the bar was raised really high this year.
What's on your mind?
We're all over Twitter. We have the HackASAT handle.
We have Defense Digital for DDS.
We have the websites up.
We want to hear from you.
We're still operating on Discord. We will through the day.
We want to be involved in this community, not just for a few days during the summer, but all year long.
So I personally, and I know Will as well, want to hear your hardest ideas.
Bonus points for zombie interactions.
But, you know, we want to hear them.
Yeah, I get your style points somewhere, Brad.
So Brad, I don't know, from my view, what a successful conclusion.
Again, congrats to all the teams.
Continue learning from the websites that we have up.
Let us hear from you.
And hopefully by this time next year, we'll be on to the next great, amazing Capture the Flag Challenge and the next great set of workshops so that we all get smarter.
So for now, we're signing off from Between Two Nerds, Meet the Nerds, All the Nerds, Some of the Nerds, Nerds Meet Zombies.
But everyone, stay safe, love the interactions this year, and look forward to hearing more from you.
Back to you, Jordan.
Thanks very much, Dr. Roper and Brett.
From another nerd to two more.
We appreciate your drive for making this event and the many other events related happen.
Additionally, thanks very much to the core four, Amanda, Delia, John, and Steve.
Finally, thanks to you, the audience, for spending your weekend with us.
Stay safe, enjoy the rest of DEFCON, the Aerospace Village, the Defense Digital Service Workshops, and all of the other happenings this weekend.