A little pause... and we are back.
A little pause... and we are back.
A little pause... and we are back.
A little pause... and we are back.
A little pause... and we are back.
A little pause... and we are back.
A little pause... and we are back.
Welcome to Space Security Challenge 2020, HackASAP.
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 HackASAP qualification round.
Now, eight finalist teams are stepping up to the ultimate challenge.
They are hacking a satellite.
Welcome to Space Security Challenge 2020, or HackASAP.
I'm your host, Jordan Wines, and I'm very excited to be with you today.
I'm here in Melbourne, Florida, at HackASAP HQ, where eight satellites are spinning out
of control as the teams do their best to restore functionality, all for a piece of a $100,000
prize pool.
These teams, from 11 different countries around the world, include not only some that are
very familiar to those of us from the Capture the Flag, or CTF, community, but also include
many newcomers who assembled just to answer the call for HackASAP.
Let's meet our teams.
To get to this final event, individuals on these eight teams had to beat out over 6,000
other competitors for a coveted invitation.
This required mastery not only in traditional CTF hacking skills, like reverse engineering,
and vulnerability research, but also in areas new to the CTF community, including orbital
mechanics, astrophysics, space-based communication systems, and many others.
Today and tomorrow, each of our eight teams will race the others through a series of challenges
to regain control over their Flatsat.
If you've followed our story at hackasat.com and launch.com.com, you might know that through
some bad code and poor business choices, our defunct launch.com company has accidentally
triggered a satellite intended for the year 2000 to be launched in 2020 with no one in
control.
In our fictional storyline, this satellite has been co-opted by nefarious forces, and
it's up to our competitors to regain control over the many components.
Since qualifying, each team was shipped a physical Flatsat, and these Flatsats are not
only prizes for their qualifying performance, but also allow the teams to become familiar
with the hardware and software before this final event.
So what's the difference between a satellite and a Flatsat?
Think of a Flatsat as a bench version for testing components of an actual satellite
without necessarily being exactly what you would send into space.
The satellites you can watch in our live webcams are Flatsats, but don't worry, not
all of the competition this weekend will be terrestrial.
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.
Being good hackers, of course, we call this Challenge Zero.
Challenge Zero.
Here's what we know. An adversary has obtained access to the satellite's ground station.
Once they obtained access, they kicked us out.
The challenge? Teams must obtain network access to the ground station.
This is called Challenge Zero because it's required for the teams to even kick the game off.
While most of our challenges will have teams focusing on components that are inside of
their Flatsats, Challenge Zero is all about gaining access to the ground station that
they'll be using to communicate with their Flatsat.
And again, this is not a simulation. All of these eight Flatsats may be here on Earth,
but they're completely untethered, floating on a cushion of air, and each one being connected
wirelessly from a separate radio link.
In the first hour of gameplay, teams have been getting their bearings and working on
solving Challenge Zero. In fact, just before this broadcast went live, we received word
that this challenge was actually solved by Team Samurai. Congratulations to them.
Let's go ahead and see a little bit more about Team Samurai.
Team Samurai is a mainstay in the CTF community. In fact, one of the fun facts about this community
is that I've competed against Samurai about as many times as I've actually competed with them.
This community is tight-knit, people move around between them, and it's good to see them jump
into the lead and take a start on the scoreboard.
They're now going to be focusing on Challenge One, which we're going to give you a little
bit of a hint on what that entails now.
The Challenge. Teams must regain communication with a satellite.
While this event was originally planned to be in-person during DEF CON in the Aerospace
Village, thanks to the tireless efforts of dozens of people involved behind the scenes,
we're instead streaming to you live throughout the event.
Not only has the game itself been adapted to allow for remote participation from our
eight teams over VPN, but the spectator experience has changed as well.
There are many different ways you can now experience HackASAT.
For a simpler interface, just visit hackasat.com with a web-based scoreboard, these periodic
live updates streamed right in center, and links to other resources.
For a more immersive experience, head over to virtual.hackasat.com, where you can get
all of the above and more, including watching our satellites live via one of four dedicated
webcam feeds, get more technical game data from the 3D Octagon scoreboard, as well as
many other resources about our competitors, the flatsats, the technologies involved in
space, and even communicate with other viewers in a dedicated chat and have a few social
interactions.
No need to remember all that just now though, all you have to remember is that you can find
it all on hackasat.com and virtual.hackasat.com.
The HackASAT team is also partnering with the Aerospace Village, one of the many villages
you'd normally get to experience in person at DEF CON.
After 15 years of attendance, I know I'm not the only one missing many of my friends
and our hallway conversations at DEF CON.
Hopefully, we can recreate a little bit of that experience here.
In addition to all of that we have going on at HackASAT, make sure you check out the rest
of what DEF CON, the Aerospace Village, and our friends over at Defense Digital Service
are doing this weekend.
And hope to see you back here as we check in on how our teams are doing and hear more
about the vision behind HackASAT at our next update at 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern.
Thanks for watching.
And I hope to see you back here at 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern.
Thanks for watching.
And I hope to see you back here at 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern.
Thanks for watching.
And I hope to see you back here at 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern.
And I hope to see you back here at 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern.
Thanks for watching.
And I hope to see you back here at 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern.
Thanks for watching.
Welcome back to HackASAT. I'm your host, Jordan Wines.
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 two and three on that challenge.
Let's go ahead and take a look at those two teams and see what we know about them.
I particularly enjoy the contrast between these two teams that joined samurai at the top of the leaderboard earlier today.
SolarWine has decidedly not from a CTF background, whereas PFS definitely has a strong background in the CTF community.
In fact, I only found out after they'd already qualified that I actually knew some of those members of that team.
After those two teams scored on Challenge Zero, every other team was eventually able to solve Challenge Zero over the next several hours,
though you'll notice on the scoreboard that some of them received less points.
This is because each challenge has a degradation period.
This means that for 30 minutes after the first solve, all other teams have a chance to score for full points,
but after that, they only have an additional two hours to solve that particular challenge.
During the two-hour period, the points available for that challenge slowly go to zero.
While it puts the pressure on our teams to stay up with their peers,
it means that no one can get stuck on a single challenge that leaves them behind for the entire event.
At the end of that two-and-a-half-hour period, we give all teams our solution, though of course those old points are gone forever.
This is primarily a facet of being a serial CTF.
In many CTFs, challenges can be solved in parallel,
so this was an attempt to keep the game going even if you get stuck on one challenge.
Of course, one concern was that this would unfairly punish some teams in different time zones.
Thankfully, we are only running the satellites for nine hours of gameplay each day,
and it lines up fairly well with hacker standard time, anywhere from 4 p.m. to 1 a.m., depending on the team.
One advantage of this particular scheme of point degradation is that we can explain in detail the solution for challenges that have expired.
Here's our official explainer for Challenge Zero.
Challenge Zero
Here's what we know. An attacker has obtained access to the satellite's ground station through an internet-facing website.
Once they obtained access, they kicked us out.
The challenge? Teams must regain network access to the ground station.
Here's how they do it.
An internet-facing website exists on the same subnet as the ground station.
Teams must identify and exploit a vulnerability in the web server,
then use it as a foothold within the network to pivot to the ground station and gain access.
So for Challenge Zero, teams first had to extract a key from the Ruby web service used to generate sessions.
Then they used that to forge credentials to the service as an admin user.
Finally, the admin page, they could actually find a piece of it where they could execute shell commands.
They were sued, and there were some other intricacies they had to figure out.
But eventually, they got a shell in the box, or they got access to an SSH key on that box,
and that ultimately gave them connections to their Cosmos ground station.
This is the machine that they would be using for the rest of the event to control their particular flatsats.
They issue commands through the Cosmos server, goes over the RF link to their satellites.
While Samurai had a head start with access to their server first,
PFS was able to take the lead about an hour ago by solving Challenge One.
As a reminder, the goal of Challenge One is to re-establish better communications with their flatsat,
and we'll learn more about how they solved that once all teams have solved that challenge.
Not to be up done, Poland Cannon to Space followed shortly thereafter, bringing them neck and neck for first and second.
Poland Cannon to Space is actually a conglomeration of two teams, P4 and Dragon Sector.
Both Dragon Sector and P4 are very recognizable names in the CTF community,
with Dragon Sector having a pretty good claim maybe at one of the all-time winningest CTF teams, if not the most.
And of course, P4 has done very, very well, especially this year in the competition.
And of course, their team name itself is a reference to a funny webcomic that you should Google if you haven't seen it.
It even has its own video game.
If you're interested in some more of the history of these teams that have played CTFs before,
make sure to check out ctftime.org, a website that actually tracks teams' performance across different events,
and has a global yearly ranking system that's hotly contested.
That's all for our next game update, but it's been a busy one.
Next, HackASAT has been the work of many different organizations coming together,
but the primary vision has come from two individuals that we wanted to let you hear from directly.
They are Dr. Will Roper, Assistant Secretary for Acquisition Technology and Logistics, Department of the Air Force,
and Mr. Brett Goldstein, Leader of the Rebel Alliance at the Pentagon, Director of Defense Digital Service.
And they're joined by our intrepid interviewer, Roro, who will be asking them the hard-hitting questions
in a segment we're calling Between Two Nerds.
Welcome to Between Two Nerds. My name is Brett Goldstein. I'm the Director of the Defense Digital Service.
And I'm Will Roper. I run all of the Air Force and Space Force programs.
And we would like to introduce Roro, our moderator today.
Roro is a member of the Defense Digital Service and has mad security skills.
First things first, I wanted to ask you all the question that I've reached out to a bunch of hackers in the community about.
And the most important thing that's on their minds right now is how do you attach the lanyard to the cassette tape?
Well, that's a question for Dr. Roper, I think.
Dr. Roper, considering your advanced work in this space...
Well, I mean, first of all, there's a design issue here.
So, whoever did this, you're fired if you're on the Air Force.
Thing two, there's no place to immediately hook it.
So, I'd say we just tie it.
We just tie it here and then we hang it around our neck and get a better cassette next year, whoever did this.
Do you have the duct tape?
I mean, basically, if you have a small neck, you're okay.
Like an actual duck. I could wear this if you don't have duct tape.
So, the other question that has also been on their minds is why are y'all here at DEF CON safe mode?
Sure, well, I mean, you had incriminating evidence on me, so I'm here.
We're going to try to go flat the whole time, Roro.
This is between two nerds, after all, the inaugural shooting.
So, no laughter, no fun. This is serious business.
We're hoping to be syndicated.
Eventually. We can't afford ferns yet, but we're headed towards that next step.
So, Roro, we need a bit more of a positive attitude on this.
Like, as we think about sort of our future careers, there seems to be a lot of potential.
Rho cubed today, Roro.
So, Roro, in all seriousness, because we're being serious here between two nerds.
Satellite security is a big deal.
You know, all joking aside, it's a big deal.
Our lives depend on space working in a benign, peaceful way that makes life better for everyone.
You need it for the data that's coming to your phone right now.
You need it for navigation.
You even need it to get cash out of an ATM.
Everyone's lives, as we sit here today, is connected to space.
Well, you can imagine the military is no exception.
We're connected to space.
We use it to move planes from point A to point B, to guide weapons, to plan disaster relief missions.
Everything we do.
So, if you're thinking about a way to beat our military, holding space assets at risk is a pretty easy way to take a big leap forward in terms of your capabilities.
And so we want to know if cyber is something we need to put more worry into.
So we're here to see if people can hack a satellite, which we think they'll be able to.
And we hope to learn from the community how to be better and more cyber resilient in systems we build in the future.
As an international community of hackers and nerds, how can they help out? What is the call to action here if there is one?
Sure, and I'm going to try to stay flat. But boy, it's really hard because I'm excited about this.
Anyway, back to Between Two Nerds.
Just being here and being interested is a huge deal. We want to learn from you. The military is here to learn.
Historically, we have been secure by hiding behind our fence lines and keeping systems secret until they're used on the battlefield.
Well, that doesn't work anymore.
Software is increasingly the delineator in whether systems are dominant or out of the fight.
So we're getting outside of our fence lines and involving communities that can help us, like DEFCON, to see if we need to up our game in cyber.
And so if our satellites have to operate to make the military work the way it's supposed to, we want to expose opportunities to hack them ahead of us taking them into conflict.
So what I hope to learn from DEFCON, from all the amazing community members here, is how good we are today and what we need to do to be better in the future.
So the Department of Defense historically has operated cybersecurity through obscurity, and that is a culture that we're trying to change.
So I'm fortunate I run the Defense Digital Service, which is affectionately known as a SWAT team of nerds.
And we are out there, and we are trying to bring the very best in technical talent to the DoD.
And part of that is about technology, but part of it is about culture.
So when Will and I went to DEFCON last year, I'd been attending DEFCON for many years, but I brought Will, and I said to him, this is a community we need to embrace.
And one, DoD does not need to be afraid of this community. These are folks who we should be friends with.
But two, we need to raise our bar. We need to challenge our software. We need to try and test our systems.
And by doing that, we bring the very best in cybersecurity.
So I love this partnership. We learn a lot. We challenge ourselves.
Sometimes we learn things that are hard, but this is a community we really want to embrace.
So can you tell me a little bit more about how you got involved with the space, or what was the initial ask?
So the first time I went to DEFCON, I was by myself.
And I had recently left my first stint in government, and people were like, you have to go to DEFCON.
And I went there, and I'm like, holy shit, there's a gazillion people here, there are crazy things going on, and people said, don't bring a phone in.
And I was completely enamored with this community.
And then I came to DoD, and as we're trying to change this culture, which is an obscurity culture, a security by checklist,
I'm like, this is a community that can help make us smarter, and help us, again, raise the bar, even against ourselves.
So by bringing Will, and then showing all of the crazy cool things that we're doing, it allowed for that DDS Air Force relationship,
which we could then come back and try and do some really cool things.
And the funny part was last year, when DEFCON was winding up, I go to Will, and I'm like, we should go back.
And Will's like, yeah, we should go back. And I'm like, what do you think we should do?
And DoD's like, we should bring a satellite. And that was crazy. But now it's real.
Yeah, it's great when crazy and real can be the same inside the Pentagon.
And Brett's exactly right, that this is a community that the Department and the Pentagon have been afraid of embracing.
Partly because it's an old Cold War culture that's just behind the times.
And another is simply because it doesn't get outside of its five-sided walls very often.
And my first trip to DEFCON was amazing. I'm a string theorist by background.
I work in physics. I crossed over into defense for really weird reasons.
But it's been an awesome job of getting to run $60 billion of satellites and airplane and cyber capabilities every year.
As I look at this amazing portfolio of programs, everything is driven by software.
And the United States government and our amazing men and women in uniform have put so much time and treasure into these amazing military systems that increasingly operate based on their software.
So if you're looking to defeat us, you don't have to recreate the same systems, build a fighter to match ours, build a satellite to match ours.
You just need to be able to hack us.
And so I came last year wanting to see could people who have a great amount of expertise but not a lot of hands-on capability inside the military get inside a system like an F-15 fighter or the systems that enable it.
And so we brought some of those enabling systems and the hacker community got in.
But getting in was not the point of being here. It was the learning that happened afterwards.
The hacker community got to learn something about our military systems and we left knowing how to make them more secure.
And so we want to do the same thing for satellites.
It's a very different problem than handing you a piece of hardware and saying, can you get in?
The satellite isn't here, it's overhead, moving at 7 kilometers a second.
And it only talks to the ground at certain places where we have a ground station that uplinks and downlinks different commands.
This is a wicked hard problem.
But I expect the DEFCON community is going to get in again.
And the question we're going to ask is what should we learn?
What should we do better?
Because cyber is something any country, any terrorist group can try to do against our military.
It's quicker, easier, and more seductive than trying to take us head on.
So this dark side of the force is something we're going to have to be able to defeat.
And we're here to learn from people who know a lot more than we do.
For the F-15 system, it was really to probe just how many different ways do people get in.
Do we have a design flaw? Is it a design flaw?
Is it a hardware flaw where we've got embedded systems that have back doors that can be accessed?
Is it a software flaw or is it a little bit of all of the above?
It's a little bit of all of the above.
And so after doing a meeting with the hackers that got in, they walked through.
I tried this and it worked. Then I tried this next path and it worked.
And just like electricity always flowing through the path of least resistance,
they kept trying methods that got increasingly harder, but they didn't have to pull their toughest tricks to get in.
So the direction I think we're going, that we ought to go, is fully embracing the hacker community at DEF CON
and not waiting until systems are built to create opportunities to learn and help us learn.
We should bring the hacker community into systems as we design them.
Help us make them more secure before we're producing them.
And I think this could be win-win. We would learn a ton from this community,
but also create some of the most interesting challenges because the systems we build are unique.
They have some pretty amazing technology in them and I think the opportunity for the hacker community
to get new hands-on experience would also be really energizing and cool.
So events like HackASAT are awesome live events,
but the relationship and continuing it across a broader set of opportunities is what's more exciting.
There's an interesting synergy between, one, the hacker community can touch devices you never would think you'd be allowed to touch.
Weapons, satellites, all the things that are pretty cool.
It also helps us learn commonalities where we build a lot of different things.
And by learning those base cases of things we should do and should not do, that helps the design.
But at the same time, people need to understand that there's a creativity to hacking.
We often in the military, we think about checklists and spreadsheets and things like that.
But I know people who have done red team and hacking exercises, it's much more of an art.
And we want to bring that art into making our system safer.
So we started this planning a little bit last year and then COVID hit. How did that change the plans?
So there were moments where it was insanely stressful.
Where it's, we are charging ahead and I'm sitting there, oh my God, what's going to happen with DEF CON?
But then we realized we're perfectly situated for a virtual event.
We have a VR environment. We have all of these workshops. Everything is now accessible from anywhere.
And where I think it's really interesting is we can now provide access to these workshops at a much larger scale.
Whereas last year, like the workshops were awesome, but we were swamped.
But now in the VR environment, we can take thousands of people and also for access to the actual hack a set on event.
It's open to the world now and it's going to be super cool.
So a little anxiety, but we are good to go. And I'm really excited.
I'm more excited about the virtual event than I would have been doing a live event at DEF CON.
And don't get me wrong, it would be awesome to have an event, live event with people attending,
being able to shake hands and give high fives to the team that pull off what is going to be a very difficult challenge.
But the virtual event is going to allow so many more people to be part of this experience,
part of the community that gets to attempt this for the very first time at DEF CON.
And I am so much more excited about a bigger community than I am about putting up a stage at Las Vegas
and then taking it down after the event is over.
We got to do this a few months ago when we were kicking off our flying car program.
Long story, but pretty awesome that we're creating a new initiative to accelerate flying cars for the country.
Well, that program was supposed to be a major kickoff at South by Southwest, which canceled.
And we had to decide, what do we do?
Well, we kept the event rolling through a virtual event and had over 60,000 people participate.
We would have never had that number be able to make it down to Austin and get to an event that could probably hold no more than 2,000 tops.
So the potential for a greater community is huge doing the event this way.
We will still get all of the cool factor from multiple hacker teams having the opportunity to let their code run live in space, which is just an awesome opportunity.
But imagine this, Roro. We had over 2,000 different teams just go through the qualls.
We had over 6,000 people who have already raised their hand to be a hands-on participant.
So who knows how many people will tune in during this week.
But the opportunity to have a broad group of people is the most exciting thing about being virtual.
And I hope everyone that is logging in and participating, I hope that you're safe and well.
So we're super excited that besides HackASet, we are also having a series of workshops.
We have bricks in the air again. We have a ground station exercise.
Now, the thing that's important here is HackASet was extraordinarily competitive.
As Will mentioned, thousands of folks tried out for it and it got narrowed down to eight.
Eight teams, that's right.
And so we have eight rockstar teams doing that.
But part of what we want to do here is help people learn about the variety of technologies.
Because what's really interesting to me is this is a different type of hacking.
This is not your traditional going after a web property or a traditional software app.
There's a new set of skills to learn.
So we have workshops all available via VR, ranging from beginner level all the way up to advanced.
Because we want to help you learn more about the tooling and the skills you need for these types of systems.
And then when you get toward advanced, then you'll be ready to work on the HackASet type of events.
So we have the full stack ready for you.
One of my favorite comments coming out of one of the teammates that participated in the quals was,
I didn't know I needed a degree in physics to hack a satellite.
We don't actually need the degree, but you do need to know a little about physics to hack it.
And part of the purpose of these workshops are to introduce the peculiar new trade craft that will be needed.
So that you can take hacker skills you have today and apply them to these very different opportunities in space and in the air.
So I think we really crushed doing the virtual piece.
What do we do about stickers?
Like the whole Defcon sticker swap?
A little stressful.
Maybe we could do them like Bitcoin.
Crypto coins, that could be the new...
Because I can't get coins out right now. I have a bunch in my office.
So we can mail them, but crypto coins could be the wave of the future.
Yeah, for everyone watching, everyone in the Pentagon has coins.
They're things that you give out when someone's really done something great or helped you out.
So it goes well back in military tradition, but you give them out via handshake.
With the coin in your hand, you shake hands, it transfers from one person to the other.
So COVID-19 has put a serious dent in this time-honored tradition.
So crypto coins...
You throw the coin first, right? But then it gets... it's a hot mess.
It's even worse than that. We have them in little plastic bags, and we dump them from one hand to the other.
It completely has lost the sense of ceremony.
Tap it in the bag first, and then dump them in the hands?
There's no way to say, congratulations, stick out your hand, and then dump a coin in it.
The firm handshake is needed to say, thank you for what you've done.
I thought it was interesting last year.
The expectation of DoD was sadly pretty low.
Expecting someone in a suit, expecting someone in a uniform, who would not engage this community.
And I remember after we gave a talk last year, a bunch of folks came up and they're like, you're not what we expected.
And you're doing super cool shit. How can we help?
And those are the discussions we want to have.
Because Will and I are constantly worried. We're constantly working to raise the bar and make things better.
But we need that level of expertise and partnerships.
So I was thrilled that last year we could go directly engage.
Show that we aren't what you expect, and we do really, really cool things.
And the opportunities are really broad.
So if someone's out thinking, well, I'm interested in helping the military, but I don't know if I want to work on a weapons system.
Every technology under the sun is part of the military.
We do disaster relief every year during the hurricane season.
The Air Force is flying planes in to move people that are under stress and deliver supplies.
And that is a major part of what the military does that doesn't make the news.
We work in energy, we work in medicine, providing a lot of frontline responders to COVID-19.
All of this is empowered by software.
We need digital experts who want to help us take our game to the next level.
So no matter what you are interested in working with us on, the opportunity is there.
And we will be here year after year at DEFCON bringing opportunities for you to participate in our mission.
Learn more about us so that we can learn from you.
So when we were building mysymptoms.mil earlier this year, which is part of our COVID-19 response.
Before we let it out the door, we reached out to someone in the DEFCON community.
Because that needs to be part of our culture.
We're creating software, we think it's pretty good.
We have a pretty good SWAT team, but we want those outside eyes.
And this is for something, COVID-19 is something that's bringing us all together.
And that's a perfect example of community engagement.
And we tightened it up and we got it out the door.
From my view, the defense companies mirror the government.
And the government is slow and 20 years, if not more, behind the time.
So it has to start with the government leading the dance.
And having more people who have technical backgrounds who don't look like what you expect in the Pentagon.
Start bringing in new ideas, new technologies, and just a new culture.
And that's part of why we're here as part of DEFCON.
And part of why we're talking with you through a very different venue than you normally get out of this five-sided building.
So that's step one. The government's got to change.
Step two is government doesn't make much.
We have amazing airmen who write code for us every day.
And sci-fi inspired organizations called Kessel Run, Kobayashi Maru.
And 60 more names covering the sci-fi and comic book universe.
They're awesome teams, but they're a small component of what industry provides.
We don't build airplanes. We don't build satellites ourselves. Rarely.
And so if industry doesn't learn to adopt these new techniques.
If they don't become better at software and shift to new trends and development like containerization.
And shift to open approaches to determining errors in code like bug bounties and open sourcing of code.
Then we will continue to be further and further behind the times.
And ultimately, our model's got to be hybrid.
We won't open source all of our code. We will always have things we reserve for conflict.
But we don't open source anything today.
We did that for the first time this year.
The first time we have open source code that's needed for operations.
I expect that's the most secure code we have right now in the Air Force.
So what's next? The question I have for industry is what's next?
And when are you going to be part of the solution?
There's a cultural piece we need to get at here.
A couple things that drive me crazy.
One, good enough for government work.
Like that is absolute bullshit. End of sentence.
Two is, you know, Will mentioned that government is behind.
How is that okay?
And this is one of the reasons I left the private sector and came into government.
Because we can't be okay with this.
So part of what Will and I do is reset this culture.
And challenge ourselves, never have acceptance for that.
Because neither one of those statements make any sense to me.
So do you both have tenure in your jobs?
Because this seems like a really bad idea.
The hacking satellites...
Well, as long as it doesn't come crashing down through the roof anytime soon.
We're probably going to make it a few months more.
I will say we've taken extraordinary security precautions.
To make sure that everything is going to be okay up in orbital land.
But we are going to let teams move the satellite.
So not move it in a translational sense.
But we're going to let teams rotate it.
And if they're good enough and they can do their orbital mechanics quickly enough.
We're asking them to take a picture of the moon.
So what we hope to send out to the hacker community is a wonderful image of the moon.
Brought courtesy of the hacker team that won.
So that's a pretty, pretty awesome opportunity to have that code actually change something in orbit.
But we've taken extraordinary procedures to make sure that's all that that code will be able to do.
But Auro, your question is actually an important one.
So in terms of tenure, no, I have no idea how long I have in this job.
I came into defense through happenstance.
Worked for a couple of secretaries of defense.
Built a lot of awesome systems, very few of which I can talk about.
But amazing capabilities, swarming things, etc.
Made with a lot of incredible men and women in uniform.
But crossing over into this job, running all the Air Force and Space Force programs, which is an awesome job.
If you're ever asked to do it, say yes.
Because you get all of these amazing technologies, satellites and airplanes and cyber tools and amazing people to work with.
But you only get to be in the job as long as you're asked to do it.
And so my tenure could be very short.
And what I hope, what I pray for the Pentagon is that people in leadership will keep asking technical people to come and serve.
So if you're out there thinking, I'd love to be part of an Air Force hacking team, then come find us.
Come join us.
If you want to be part of Defense Digital Service, which would be an amazing job where you wouldn't have to wear a suit to work every day.
Come join them.
Be one of the squadron of nerds.
I'm using Air Force.
Can you be a squadron of nerds?
So the squadron of nerds is part of the SWAT team of nerds?
Squadron of nerds would be like the Air Force.
We're all squadrons.
So we could have like an auxiliary squadron of nerds.
Well, there you go.
But take the opportunity up.
You won't be sorry.
But that's ultimately the trend we need are people that have technical talent who don't want to work in the government forever.
But that say, you know, for for one, two, three years, I want to go take on some new opportunities for the government to make it easy and energizing to do that.
So I'm I'm here on a two year tour.
I am halfway through.
But the story is like I'm part of the story, but I'm not the story.
I'm part of an 80 person team.
And this is the best team I've ever been part of.
And there will be another director after me who will represent the team.
But every day, the SWAT team of nerds goes out and works on projects.
You really you can't believe it makes insane impact.
So I'll do my two years.
And but the mission will go on and the team will continue to rock.
I can see if the Air Force can make DDS an honorary squadron.
That'd be cool.
I'm taking that action.
Colonel Bailey, action taken.
That's a colonel.
Colonel, I just promoted you to Colonel Captain Bailey.
Action taken.
Can can.
Does that mean we can go to space?
This is important.
Can we just work this through?
I think astronaut training should be required for that, Brad.
So I was watching Picard with the kids last night.
And they have that transport thing.
I figured somewhere in the classified portfolio.
We're working it.
OK.
So if that works, can I go to space?
It's right next to the warp drive, right next to the photon torpedo.
So yes, when we've got teleportation done, Brad, I will personally teleport you up to the space station.
Got it.
How's the food up there?
NASA provides that, so I don't know.
Do you think there are any gummy products?
I'm going to guess... oh, I don't know, Brad.
Because gummy products have a high degree of water content.
And all that's going to outgas.
So how would mayonnaise perform in space?
Not well.
That's a critical issue.
Not well.
So you'd have to get at least a pressure-sealed vessel, but all things we can work on.
Science never stops.
I'm a little fussy about mayonnaise, so we'd want to work that through before the transporter.
So spam sandwiches not going to be on your list for astronaut?
No.
And a tank?
No, no.
I was figuring... well, I am fussy about the mayonnaise, but you can actually put mayonnaise with most foods.
Just something to ponder.
So I'm often asked, why don't we have more artificial intelligence in the Air Force than we do today?
Something I'm working very hard to change.
Well, one is it's really hard to certify something that changes all the time.
But what isn't well understood in the Pentagon, and I find through the country as a whole,
is that artificial intelligence is very fragile in the face of an adversary.
It's very easy to beat.
And so we need to get into the game more and bring the DEFCON and the hacker community into our world
and give them opportunities to start beating AI ahead of those opportunities being available commercially.
So that's where I'd like to see us go, is into algorithmic defeat.
Because that's the next generation of warfare.
And the earlier we can determine how to make it safe and secure, the better off everyone's going to be.
So I think you'll find that we're good listeners.
So we have ideas. We just talked about AI and potential issues with that.
We're talking about satellites now.
But we're curious what you think.
What are things, whether design flaws we should be thinking about, which can be really portable,
or other types of exploits that might not be on our radar.
So we'd love to just hear your thoughts.
We're going to listen.
And tell us things we don't know.
Or tell us about challenges which are really hard.
Like, a year ago, hacking a satellite felt pretty hard.
But we're there now.
What is a really hard one that you're thinking about, that we can challenge ourselves for, for next year?
Why did you pick Steve Carell for Space Force?
I mean, you have to love Steve Carell, right?
I mean, I'm such a huge Office fan.
And so when that came out, I thought, you know, money just because of that.
But on the whole, when I get to talk Space Force,
beyond the hype and, you know, the glitz that the public media often shine on it,
it gets really simple to explain that, you know,
do you think that adversaries will try to take on the military in space,
given we have a ton of communications and navigation satellites?
Satellites of all kinds, whose data we pump to the systems we take into a fight.
Everyone says, well, yeah, of course, no duh.
Well, if we think adversaries are going to challenge us there, then we've got to be ready there.
But fighting in space is going to be really different than fighting in the air, on the sea, or under it.
It's a domain that's governed almost entirely by physics in a way that makes it predictable.
We know where satellites are going to be minute by minute, second by second, on forever, ad infinitum,
unless we decide to move them.
But moving satellites using that precious propellant, that's a big choice in space.
Because there are no gas stations, no place to fill up.
So it is a very different domain.
And we're just here talking about low-Earth orbit constellations,
those that are very near the Earth, that are moving around at 7 kilometers a second.
But GPS satellites are much further out, in what are medium-altitude orbits.
And satellites that do communication and detection are all the way out in geosynchronous orbit.
And though they're moving really fast relative to the Earth, they're not.
They're stationary overhead.
Every one of these is a very different domain governed by apparently different physics.
And that's why we've got men and women getting ready, who are thinking about warfare in space,
and they've got a clean sheet of paper in their hands.
How do we fight in this domain where things are very predictable?
And you can guess what answers are coming to the forefront.
We're going to have to rely on autonomy.
And that means the software that we put is going to be so important to whether we win or lose.
But then that brings you in.
If our software is going to be the cutting edge, and the autonomy it runs on is going to be how we win,
then how do we make it secure?
So I think we went through this period where, at least we as a society, didn't talk a lot about space.
And I'm happy to see that change.
Will talked about all the critical things about space.
Timing, ATMs, GPS, all of these different things.
And that is super critical.
But I guess I bring out my inner kid now, where a couple months ago I sat down,
I have three little kids, and we watched a SpaceX launch.
And there was an excitement there that I feel it's been a long time.
It's been missing from society for a bit.
There's something aspirational, inspirational about it.
And seeing the launch, seeing the landing, talking about space, thinking about the importance of it,
and all the critical things that it does, it excites me for the future.
So I'm excited that we're talking about space.
I still would like to go to space.
I don't think, Will, you've gotten your transporter done.
But with all that being said, I'm really also, until you actually take me to space, I look forward to helping protect space.
Sounds good, Brett.
And aside from just watching SpaceX, you know, just the other day we watched Perseverance and Ingenuity head up.
And so we're really, really excited about the enthusiasm in space.
And Space Force gets to provide most of the rocketry that the entire government and commercial industry uses.
So it's going to be a little while until we beam you to space.
But we've got some excellent works in rockets that can help push you there.
Do you think I could do that training thing in a couple weeks?
Just banging it out?
Let's talk about that next time on Between Two Nerds.
Thanks for coming.
Okay.
So we're really easy. We're on the Twitters. At least I'm on the Twitters. Are you on the Twitters?
I promised Brett that for DEFCON, I would send out my first tweet.
So I'm really looking forward to seeing Will on the Twitters.
We're also going to be... Will and I will be in the VRs during DEFCON. You can find us there.
We'll be on Twitch. We'll be all over.
And we'll make sure that we leave a link on our HackASAP site.
If you are interested in finding out more about participating in future hacking events with the Air Force or DDS,
we will leave a place for you to find us, for us to contact you.
And we also want to hear your suggestions.
And when COVID is done, if you're in D.C., come to the Pentagon. We'd love to hear your ideas.
So can zombies swim?
I don't know, Brett. I think it probably depends on what movie we're in and whether they knew how to swim before they were zombified.
So I intentionally moved to an island where part of my intent was being zombie safe.
How deep is the water?
Pretty deep.
Did you see World War Z?
I did.
Is it that deep?
It might not be deep enough.
You might need a better island.
Thanks, RoRo, for the Q&A and Dr. Roper and Brett for your vision behind HackASAP.
Remember at the beginning of the day I told you that not all of this event would happen on the Earth?
Well, I hope teams are ready because we are about to throw them a massive curveball.
The on-orbit challenge is about to drop on our unsuspecting teams.
Well, okay, they have a little bit of suspicion.
But our teams have only a few hours to create a mission plan for an actual satellite in space.
Their task is to orient a spinning satellite, point its camera at the moon, take a photograph, and send it back home to the HackASAP contest officials.
The team with the best solution will win what might even be a more valuable prize than the cash part of this competition, bragging rights.
That's right. One team in this competition can say that their code directed a real satellite in space and took a proverbial moon shot.
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 this 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.
The teams are given a command dictionary with the format for submitting the commands and parameters. The rest is up to them.
There's one final important fact for this on-orbit challenge.
While there's no score associated with it like the other challenges, it is a pass-fail challenge.
Teams must produce a successful solution to be eligible for the prize money in this competition.
If they want to end up on the podium, they have to be successful in this challenge. No pressure or anything.
I'll see you back here in about an hour at 12.50pm Pacific, 3.50pm Eastern as we check in with our teams on both their Earth-based and extraterrestrial challenges.
EARTH-BASED CHALLENGE
Welcome back to a Hackistat competition update. I'm your host Jordan Wines. 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 seabread with solutions for challenge one.
1064 seabread has been around for several years going all the way back to
when they were first high school friends playing as CTFs. In fact I first met
them five years ago as the only team of high school students at a collegiate CTF
competition and the team even included a standout freshman. Yep a high school
freshman competing with college freshmen and college seniors. And while I don't
personally know any of 1553 after they gave me some interesting facts about
them I kind of feel like I do. For example one team member has additional
sound dampening around his office due to his above-average laughter volume. One
member was fired from a previous job for quote smiling too much quote and another
member was a college mascot. Finally their team logo or team motto rather is
preparation is the enemy of innovation which sounds a little bit like an excuse
but you can't argue with their results. Let's take a look at the solution for
challenge one now that all teams have it. Challenge number one. Here's what we
know. Having access to the ground station means we can attempt communication but
the satellite is spinning out of control which complicates everything. The
challenge. Teams must regain communication with the satellite. Here's
how they do it. To get started teams must set the command and telemetry rates
appropriately and the power output to maximum. Because the satellite is
spinning additional link margin is required. The teams receive periodic
telemetry but are not able to command the vehicle. Based on the review of the
anomaly resolution section in the user's guide they realize that to increase the
link margin they should increase radio output power and decrease link rate. They
command the radio to high power and low rate mode and regain communications with
the satellite. The link is limited to low rate meaning that what they can send and
receive from the satellite is limited. This is a good example of the type of
challenge that is a little different in this type of CTF versus many other types
of CTF. While teams were told to quote restore communication quote that goal
was much more ambiguous than often traditional CTF challenges and mirrors
more of the real-world problem-solving you run into in space-based applications.
Because our imaginary bad actors had intentionally modified the satellite's
orientation and they were moving around uncontrollably communication between the
ground station and the satellite was not stable. To fix this teams needed to both
lower the transfer rates boost the power and that would finally let them
enable ground-based communications and that would let them control all the
components of the satellite or at least the ones that they've been able to
figure out so far. In fact the challenge was real-world enough that at least one
team was able to solve it in the normal order of just working with the satellite
without even specifically realizing they had solved the challenge. All that brings
us to challenge two. Challenge two. Here's what we know. The satellite is
spinning out of control because the guidance navigation and control system
or GNC is inoperable. We suspect sabotage. The challenge teams must repair the GNC
system as quickly as possible to stop the dangerous spinning. As teams begin to
as teams now have regular communication with their satellites they'll need to
get the movement under control but it's also worth mentioning at this point that
these satellites do actually have their own battery and power supply. They're
taken off each night to be charged and while power utilization is not a scored
metric in the game if one team does manage to cause too much movement or
otherwise drain all of their power that could impact their ability to interact
with the satellite for the remainder of the day. Looking forward to seeing what
they do. We'll see you back here in another hour for our next competition
Welcome back to the competition formerly known as Space Security Challenge 2020
now HackASat. Well it's actually still known by Moth. I just wanted to change
the intro because they're gonna get pretty repetitive. I'm your host Jordan
Wines. The game has been a little bit slower this hour but that makes sense
because teams are starting to get into the harder challenges. As a reminder
teams are currently working on two separate challenges. First the on-orbit
challenge is it as it the on-orbit challenge involves them designing a
payload that will execute a moonshot taking a picture of the moon from an
actual orbiting satellite. While that challenge won't show up on the
scoreboard with points it is a pass-fail challenge. Only teams that score within
a time window will be eligible for podium placement and the related
$50,000 $30,000 and $20,000 prizes. Since there's a lot of data being displayed on
our octagon scoreboard otherwise known as that thing you're looking at when
it's not my face on this YouTube feed here's a quick primer on some of the
elements. First the display on the left shows a scoreboard breakdown that
breaks down each team's points earned per challenge, shows the total score and
includes a log of recent solves and messages sent from each team to their
flat sat. Note that the message contents have actually been sanitized to not
give away answers but you might find some other things there instead. On the
right scoreboard you'll see the time of the teams you see the score of the teams
over time. Right now it's skewed a little bit to the left but as the game
progresses it will stretch out and we'll see how they do on each of these
new challenges. Finally each team has a dedicated panel with a main view and
three supplementary views. Technically we can change the supplementary views but
right now the main view shows a team logo with their color, a representation
of the team's flat sat including the rotation, position over the earth and
messages sent. Note that the little pew-pew you see are just for visual
effect and not actually representative of actual messages being sent. On the
graph right now on the right, excuse me, the three graphs on the right, the top
graph is yaw, the middle graph is angular velocity and the bottom graph is total
messages all done over time which makes for a nice overview of the different
activity from each team's flat sat. Remember you can vote to control which
of these views you're looking at in the virtual environment inside of the
Stardome. That feed doesn't cut over these live updates and always shows the
Octagon. While we wait on our teams to continue to solve these challenges
they're working on, now's a great time to introduce another segment we call Space
Talk. If, like me, you're a hacker who might know about computers but is
ignorant of what goes into making code run in space, there's a lot of new things
to learn. Our first Space Talk episode is about how to keep track of time in space.
So what time is it in space? Well that's a complicated question. For the
astronauts on the International Space Station and for most orbiting satellites
they run on Coordinated Universal Time or UTC. It's not actually a time zone but
rather a time standard that just so happens to be the same as GMT. It's used
to prevent time zone confusion and give a standard time to reference. But for
astronauts especially it's just a number. On the International Space Station the
Sun rises and sets about every 90 minutes so there isn't any relationship
between the Sun and what time it is that's meaningful to the astronauts.
Satellites are the same way. Time is primarily used to inform them when to
execute commands and perform operations. Universal time is just a reference
number that's easy to relate back to your local time. But that's not the only
time that's used for space applications. UTC is not an exact accounting of the
passage of time but rather strives to stay aligned with the rotation of the
Earth because it's primarily people on Earth that are using it. Earth's rotation
is both irregular in the short term and slowing down permanently in the long
term. Earth days are getting about 1.6 milliseconds longer every single day.
This isn't in any way noticeable in daily life but can be very significant
over time. As a result we use a different time scale when dealing with orbital
motion. Orbital motion doesn't care about the Earth's rotation at all. It must be
extremely precise because of the massive distances involved. The most
common time standards used are Julian date and terrestrial time which are both
entirely independent of Earth's rotation. To give an idea of just how different
these time scales can be, over the last century between 1900 and 2000, universal
time was about 64 seconds slower than terrestrial time. It's a tiny difference
to us but when you're dealing with precise predictions over millions of
miles it gets very significant. And that's the key. What time it is in space
isn't important so you can look at the clock on the wall and know if you need
to go to bed. It's important so you can know where you are and know where things
are. Everything in space is constantly moving, orbiting one object or another.
Telling where it's located is intrinsically linked to what time it is.
This gets to our next question. How do you tell where something is in space? As
I said before, everything in space is constantly moving and orbiting around
something else. All this motion is primarily controlled by gravity. So to
know where something is right now, we use where it was at some time in the past
and we predict where it is now based on the laws of gravitational motion. Now you
might ask how do I tell you where it is or even where it was? On Earth I could
tell you where to go based on your address or some landmark and these are
useful frames of reference that we can use to fully communicate where something
is. In space there are an infinite number of reference frames that we can use but
we also have an added complexity. Since again everything is moving all the time,
to have a frame of reference we need to incorporate time. There are several
different ways of describing where things are but we typically focus on two
reference frames. One, what's easiest for us to use. For example, if I want to take
a photo of the moon I would want to know where the moon is in relation to where
I'm going to be when I have my camera. And two, what's easiest to calculate.
Orbital math is hard and many times impossible so picking a reference frame
that makes your calculation as easy as possible is often necessary. This
reference point is usually whatever has the most significant gravitational
effect and ignores all other motion. For satellites we use Earth. We want to know
where they are relative to our location on the Earth. This frame of reference is
called Earth Centered Earth Fixed or ECEF as it is rotating with the Earth
and is fixed to it. It's the same as GPS coordinates but it's much much easier to
calculate the position of the satellite when we ignore the rotation of the Earth
which is a different frame of reference called Earth Centered Inertial or ECI. So
if I saw where a satellite was in relation to me in the ECEF frame at time
t0 and I need to know where the satellite will be in relation to me in
the ECEF frame at time t1, we actually need to calculate three different steps.
One, translate the coordinates I observed at t0 in ECEF to ECI at t0. Two,
translate the orbital motion of the satellite in ECI from t0 to t1 where our
calculations are easier. And three, translate the coordinates I calculated
at t1 back to ECEF from ECI. Steps one and three both require translating
between these coordinate frames ECEF and ECI. So how do we do that translation?
Here is where we now introduce the idea of an epoch. An epoch is a point in time
that we use as a reference to translate between these types of frames.
Specifically we use the J2000 or Julian date 2000 epoch to translate between
ECEI and ECEF as we set the ECEI reference frame to be the same as the
ECEF at that time. That way we can calculate the translation between them
by calculating how much the earth has rotated since Julian date 2000. This is a
simplification of the constant translation and calculation done
throughout satellites, space technology, and astronomy. But that is why time and
space are both extremely important and highly dependent on really what you're
looking to do with them. Thanks to Jess Coffey for putting those videos together.
That one was epic. Now this was going to be where I signed off for this update
but as we were live PFS actually jumped up on the scoreboard yet again solving
challenge 2. This means that we can now move on to exposing all teams to
challenge 3. Challenge 3. Here's what we know. With the repair complete on the GNC
the satellite has stopped spinning but we still can't communicate with the
payload module or operate the imager. We have to ask ourselves what else did they
damage on this satellite? The challenge? Teams must restore communication with
the payload module so we can get it working again. This has been our last
hourly update for the day. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone back here at
4 p.m. Pacific 7 p.m. Eastern for a daily recap of all that's happened so far.
Welcome to Space Security Challenge 2020, HackASAP. The final event of the
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 HackASAP 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
HackASAP. 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 hitting an 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 Hackasat, 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, or 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 cyber security 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 cyber security 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
satellites, 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 Pulling 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 the resulting
mission plan meets key criteria. One, the commands are generated in the correct
order and are within the specified period. Two, the image capture angle of
the moon is within specifications. Three, 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. 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 can into 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 DEF CON 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, you
know, rough times today. The flatsats are, you know, 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. So tomorrow we're hoping for... Sorry, is this pacing what you expected?
Speaking of like 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, you know, 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 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. 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 great to see 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? Oh, I absolutely miss it. You know, 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 better than getting really, really sick, I guess. Given the alternative,
yeah, we're all kind of 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 safety
reasons that we would do this via Zoom and we'd be able to work it out that way.
So thanks for doing that. Tell me a little bit more about the rationale behind the
scoring algorithm and the game design. This decay and the kind of the grace
window, what design constraints went into that decision?
Okay, so the main design constraint with this is it's a very linear
capture-the-flag game. So what has to happen is we're trying to get teams to
take over this or 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 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 is 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, that 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 at a point 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...
Nudge 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 satellite control
system, Cosmos, that's where teams have to figure out how to turn telemetry on on
the satellite, because it's not 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 two requests a second 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 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 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 have lost you a little bit there for some network.
Oh, you're back now. Go ahead.
Yeah. OK. Yeah.
It costs, you know, millions to 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 on 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.
I 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
HackASet final event. Overnight, we'll be taking our FlatSats offline so they can
get a good rest, a.k.a. have their batteries charged, and so the competition
organizers can recharge their batteries, a.k.a. 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.