Hey, how's it going, DEF CON?
Super excited to get to talk to you guys about one of these things I'm passionate about,
which just happens to be security and magic.
Today, we're going to be going over Outposts, Forces, and Equivocates,
a treatise on how magicians speak.
I learned that word all by myself, too. I'm very proud of it.
But let's go ahead and get started here.
So, starting off, I'm hex 90, no-op, not 0x90, whatever you want to call me.
I don't really care. I'm a magician. I'm also a full-time software engineer.
I have a background in security, love to break things,
and most importantly, I don't need more than my current 200 Twitter followers,
so no need for any handles or anything.
But overall, a fairly unremarkable person, and you don't need to worry about it.
What this talk is, I want to cover three major tenets within magic,
specifically how we handle choices and how we handle making people feel
like they're making choices, but ultimately, it's either something
in our favor or something that we want to happen.
So, we're going to be covering forcing, multiple outs, and equivocates.
The interesting thing about these three techniques is that they're all super similar,
but they do have some small key differences that make them worth talking about
as an individual concept.
Going forward, what this talk is not going to be...
I don't want to feel like I'm giving people permission to heckle performers.
Performing is extremely difficult, and honestly, if you have an interest in magic,
the time to do it is not during a performance or a show.
Honestly, a lot of magicians are pretty down-to-earth people.
They're just people who are just as nerdy as you or I,
just kind of doing a thing that they love.
So, if you have an interest, honestly, take a magician aside,
say, hey, I think that's really cool, and I want to try it.
And they'll more often than not give you some cool books or some tips
on how to get into magic.
And I think that's really awesome because we're a really open community,
but please don't harass them because you know how to do some stuff now.
Also, this talk isn't about any secretly documented human cheat codes
to make people act in ways that they normally wouldn't.
You're not going to get someone to act against their interests
by saying some magic words or hit some crazy synapses
that are going to make them all of a sudden forget who they are.
This is all very real, well-published, at least in the magic world,
techniques that present the illusion of choice
while you remain completely in control.
I also want to take a moment to address the fact that we have...
I am not in control of the slideshow right now.
So, I'll be saying, next slide.
And I'm sorry, it's not the most beautiful thing in the world,
but I don't have a clicky thing.
So, I won't be able to do that.
And also, quarantine has made it so this week has been
the most human interaction I've had to deal with in like six months.
So, I apologize if I sound less than human.
But let's go ahead and hit the first term.
So, forces.
Essentially, a force is the appearance of different values to be chosen,
but through subterfuge, the only option is a single choice.
This is when other choices cannot be selected.
This is... I have 52 cards, and I really, really need someone
to pick a specific thing.
It's when you have no option but the primary choice
that you want them to select.
Can we go to the next slide?
A super over-the-heads term.
And honestly, next time you have an opportunity to do a coin flip,
go ahead and try to say this, but tails I win, heads you lose.
Very quickly, if you read it, it's easy to see how obvious that is.
But ultimately, this is a force.
There's no other option but to have them pick a wrong choice here.
And if you actually try this, and you have confidence in your language,
you'd be surprised with how many times you can actually get away with this.
It's pretty fun, especially if you need to settle any bets within a bar.
The next slide, we have multiple outs.
This is the appearance of free choice, but ultimately all the possibilities,
all the possible decisions are accounted for and expected.
This is used when you need a freedom of choice,
and they need to actually feel like they have a free choice,
like everything is fully free.
And the reason why you want to do this is just sometimes
when you're forcing someone to pick a specific thing,
unless that force is perfect, and it's designed for the situation,
you can start to pick up on it.
You can kind of detect something in your brain goes off and says,
I'm being told to do something that I might not want to do.
And there's an instant fight response.
But if the pressure is no longer on the decision,
and it's on the response, then you can get a little more into this.
And if we go to the next slide, Penn and Teller, a while ago,
they had the perfect example of multiple outs.
They had a special called Penn and Teller off the deep end.
And to give you an idea of how long ago this was,
Aaron Carter was also on this special, and he sang a song underwater
while they did magic tricks with scuba diving,
as well as a bunch of other stuff on the beach.
But one of the effects that they did was they had 52 reveals,
which is sewing a playing card into your jacket,
hiding a giant card in a pot of plants,
kids having them written on them in sunscreen.
They had 52 different values that they could potentially reveal,
and essentially they had someone selecting a completely random card
and naming it, and then suddenly they knew where it was,
or they knew how to reveal it.
And it made it seem like this was the only option that could have happened,
because who would really set up 52 possible answers for this?
And I think what they did was a perfect example
to show the idea of what a multiple out is.
Next slide.
Equivocate.
Equivocate essentially just means double entendre.
I think it sounds cooler.
But ultimately, you're using open-ended questions and vague language
to create ambiguity around choice or knowledge,
and I'm seeing that there's a typo in this slide,
and I'm kicking myself, but I love it.
You also use it when you need to control the perception of information,
even having different definitions between different people.
In magic, this is called dual reality.
This allows you to have the same sentence,
based on the context that two people are coming from,
view it differently.
And I feel like the equivocate is probably one of the most powerful terms
when it comes to controlling decisions coming from people,
as well as it's the most applicable to social engineering.
And it's actually one of the many reasons
why magicians won't perform a trick twice,
very similar to multiple outs.
Everyone's heard one of the rules of magic is
you never perform a trick twice,
and equivocates and multiple outs are a part of that.
If you do the same effect, but you have to go a different direction,
and someone's seeing it twice in a row,
they're going to easily be able to pick up that there's two different paths
that they possibly could have gone down.
And it kind of does damage to the effect.
As well as if you view magic like a joke,
you wouldn't say the same joke twice in a row
because everyone knows what the punchline is going to be,
and it becomes substantially less special.
But the example for equivocate, if we go to the next slide,
is are you right-handed or left-handed?
And if they respond left, then you say,
great, I need this hand to be loose,
so let's use your non-dominant hand
because we want them to be using their right hand.
But alternatively, if they would have said right,
and you go to the next slide,
are you right-handed or left-handed?
And they say right, then you say,
great, I need this hand to be strong,
so let's go ahead and use your dominant hand.
And if you notice here,
if you saw these questions side-by-side
and they're answered the same way,
that would ruin this effect.
But because of the vague language
and the lack of intent being posed in the question,
you can't actually tell what the reasoning is for the question,
and so the answer doesn't seem so alien,
but it is a little bit when you set them side-by-side.
Let's go ahead and go to the next section.
So how do these terms work?
How come people don't instantly call a bull on a lot of this?
And ultimately, it's not voodoo.
There's no real magic here.
You're simply taking advantage of people's laziness.
There's a book actually called
The Paradox of Choice, Why More is Less,
and that was written by Barry Schwartz.
And in it, he talks about the decision-making process that people have.
And it's primarily about consumerism,
but also in the book, it shows that
people are less happy with their choices when there are too many,
and often they'll take a lot longer to make a simple choice.
So people much prefer to choose from three flavors of candy versus 50,
because if they pick from 50, they're always going to be semi-disappointed.
And the perfect example of this is
anyone that's had to coordinate, especially now with Zoom calls,
coordinate a time with multiple people.
Anytime you ask, hey, what time works for everyone?
Because you want to be a decent human being,
and you want to accommodate everyone,
it's going to result in a conversational gridlock.
And this is because you have
an infinite amount of times that could be selected.
I can't imagine people are like,
oh, yes, I want to meet at 12 p.m. and 16 picoseconds.
But in theory, you could.
And instead, if you say, hey,
should we meet at 10 a.m. or 6 p.m. instead of what time works for everyone?
More often than not, you're going to get an answer much quicker.
Everyone's going to be able to come to a decision quicker.
They won't always be exactly the times that you requested,
but people will come.
They will coalesce into a single time a lot faster
because they're able to take that information
and they pose it as a question to themselves as how does this apply to me?
And how can I fit into this instead of also trying to account
for all these external factors?
And by limiting choices,
you make people feel more confident in their choices
instead of making it this open-ended world.
And another issue with using equivocate
or using multiple outs or even forces
is that some of these methods can leave a trail of word crumbs
that you can easily backtrack to figure out that there was manipulation.
So if you were to rewatch a Zoom call where an equivocate was used,
you could potentially figure out how vague that language is after the fact.
Sometimes in the moment, you won't necessarily see that happening,
but after the fact, you might be able to backtrack on it.
But in that moment, you also want to avoid people being able to find
and pick up on those word crumbs and backtrack on that conversation.
And the way magicians get around this is we create little memory snapshots.
So let's say we had to do a deck switch
and do all these other crazy things.
Instead of highlighting that moment of the deck switch,
we're going to try to mentally have the picture that your mind takes,
the thing that you remember, be much different.
That's also why people, magicians at least,
they'll work on blocking out their props.
So for example, we had a magician who came on and he did a Zoom show,
and part of it is he has a card under a box,
and he wants you to make sure that you see that card and you remember it,
and you remember that it didn't move.
And that's very important because when you go back in your inferring method,
you don't want to have your audience get distracted on that.
And the way we do this is we reiterate on stories that we wanted to happen,
not necessarily what exactly happened, but what we want to happen.
And then we also let the manipulations fade into the background.
We stop drawing attention to them.
If I'm doing an effect where I need to choose someone's right hand or left hand,
I'm not going to go back and say, and remember when I had you pick your hand?
We're going to pretend like that never happened.
And another misconception here is that misdirection is used,
but it's not used in the way people think about it.
A lot of people think misdirection is, hey, look over there,
and then something sneaky happens over here.
What actually happens with misdirection is you have something that you want to hide.
You want this to be in the shadows, not in the light.
So you make something interesting happen over here instead, and your focus comes here.
And then this thing, it drops away into the background.
And you can do this verbally. You can do it with props. You can do it with stage direction.
If you've ever watched live theater before, even without magic,
you'll notice when there's a monologue or something happens
and they're bringing everyone to the front of the theater,
things in the background start vanishing and they're pulling objects off of the stage.
Maybe cast members are disappearing because they're changing out a set piece or something.
But that's not because they're trying to misdirect you.
They're not trying to fool you.
They're simply encouraging you to keep your attention elsewhere,
but they don't have to do it with a trick or like a,
hey, look over here and ring a bunch of keys in your face.
And that's a very important thing when it comes to making that snapshot,
because if you're really aggressive with that, you will fail.
And that's how people can backtrack, whether it's in a magic trick
or whether you're doing this in a social engineering setting.
If you could go ahead and hit the next slide.
Now let's get into actual applications of these three concepts.
Magical applications of forces.
Obviously, there's a card force.
If I have, let's say, a duplicate of a card somewhere,
and maybe it's in my pocket or something.
And I want to do this really seamless effect
where I have a card selected, and then it goes back in the deck,
and then without bringing my hand near it,
I can pull it out of my pocket.
That's a very simple way.
But there's many ways to force a card.
The classic of all forces is exactly that.
It's the classic force.
And it's the idea of timing it in such a way that when they go,
that they naturally select it.
And this is something that takes decades of practice,
and it's something that I continuously am working on.
There's also methods of sleight of hand for forcing a card.
And there are books and books and books written on this subject
for actually learning this.
And if you guys are interested,
I'm happy to show a few methods later after the Q&A is going on.
There's also a billet or an object force.
So this is one that I think actually applies more to...
that could be used better for social engineering
or an offensive attack.
But a billet is essentially a folded piece of paper
that might have a piece of information on it.
And commonly, if you need to force something,
you might allow your audience to collect and write a bunch of things down
to get put into a box.
But maybe that whole box gets switched out,
or maybe there's a special gimmick with the box
that allows when you open it,
you can go in and you're only going to pull out the ones that you want.
And that's really important to take notice of
because you can do this with pieces of paper,
you can do it with small objects.
And of course, the last one here is a pattern force.
This was less about swapping out an object that you're providing
and more about swapping out information
that a spectator is providing for you.
So let's say we have someone who mixes up a Rubik's Cube behind their back,
they're unaware of what that information might be,
and then they bring it forward to you without looking at it.
And you're able to put something like a shell over it,
or something that allows you to change the values in it
to something that you want to get to a specific value.
And essentially in real life, if you think about it,
this would be like if someone was able to generate a random value
that they weren't able to look at, and then they gave it to you
and you said, ah, yes, your random value is three.
Of course it is.
And that could be very damaging.
I can only imagine the type of nonsense that could happen with crypto on that.
If we could go to the next slide.
Some IRL applications of forces.
So there's a bunch of different ideas
and you can get as cheeky as you want.
And I just came up with a few.
These are, of course, theoretical.
I'm coming from a magic perspective, but I also like to break things.
So I haven't actually had an opportunity to do any red teaming myself,
but I have done lots of security contracting
with black box and white box penetration tests.
And a lot of these concepts could easily apply
and leak in to a social engineering concept
because they do work so well in magic.
But when you're comparing forces in magic to forces in real life,
I realize that forces are best used for getting objects in people's hands,
thinking that they have chosen them from a group,
that this is the object that's in their best intention.
Like imagine going to a used car lot
and for some reason they want you to take this specific car.
You're like, I want this model, and you have three of them,
and they're all the same color, but why do you want me to have this one?
And of course, that should throw some red flags,
but there might be reasons for wanting to do that.
It might be advantageous for them to get it off the lot for whatever reason.
It might even be benign, but you never know.
And some other applications of forces,
for example, if you had a batch of benign USB sticks
and then you had a batch of USB sticks that had, for example,
a human interface device attack on it,
something that's going to simulate a keyboard and open up the terminal
and it's going to do lots of terrible stuff.
I've written plenty of them.
If you ever get into hit attacks, they're a lot of fun.
But if you only want a specific person to get them,
imagine if you're able to be a vendor at a party
or you're able to pose as a vendor at a party,
and everyone's getting their things and you could do some sort of grab bag switch,
which is super common in Magic.
They look very benign, but it basically makes it so
certain people can choose from one compartment
and another person can only choose from a specific compartment.
And it's a great way to get people to select a specific object.
Also, rigging a contest.
If you think about something like the lottery,
the whole lottery is based around making sure
that you can't force the value
of the ping pong ball. I don't know if they still do that.
But if you're able to force that value
or force the object of it,
that's all game over,
really. Another example is
if you could easily,
using a cross-site scripting exploit on a website,
you could change all of the link values on a website
and point it towards malicious software.
And, of course,
you can point it to a phishing website,
you can point it to a piece of software, malware, whatever you want.
But, of course, you're taking this
environment of open choices. They think that they can go anywhere,
but, of course, you're forcing them into a funnel.
They're forcing them to a single choice.
And then for a social engineering application,
if you had, for example,
a small directory of people, all with different
phone numbers and names, and
these are all your teammates, well,
if you get caught in an attack or someone wants to verify your credentials,
and instead of saying, here's my boss, go ahead
and call him, you're like, here's my team, I don't have time to deal
with this, because now you're putting weight on them.
But you're like, I don't have time to deal with this. Go ahead and call one of them and
they'll verify. Well, they're ultimately
going to end up with the same person, but
that illusion of choice, it makes it seem
there's a legitimacy behind quantity.
Because if I was a vendor,
and it's the difference between going into
a place and handing out a handful of
flash drives from a baggie, and then
having a box of 2,000 of them,
one of them, you're going to go, okay, that guy's clearly handing out
viruses, and another one, you're going to go, oh, maybe
who's going to create 2,000 pieces of
malicious hardware? I mean, I might. That sounds
like a great attack, actually. Expensive, but it could be useful.
If we could go ahead and get to the next slide.
And the magic applications
of multiple apps. There's a couple
of... there's hundreds of tricks.
There's thousands. You can find these in
books everywhere, but
I actually came up with a small little bar bet for this.
And the idea is pretty simple. If you play a game of
rock, paper, scissors, and
the proposition is, I am going
to win this game of rock, paper, scissors on the first round.
And ultimately, whatever you do, you just pick rock.
So if they go rock, paper, scissors, and this person picks rock,
well, the idea is you can say, I told you I was going to win
on the first round, and that's why I chose paper. And all you do is you have
a piece of paper in your hand because they
chose rock. Now, let's say they went ahead and they chose
scissors. Of course, you win because it's rock. And if they went
ahead and they chose paper to cover you, unfortunately,
on your paper, you do have scissors.
I don't know if that can make it out, but
essentially, you understand the constraints
of where you're in. They have three choices to
pick from. And of course, it's a con, and you're more
likely going to get punched than rewarded,
but maybe you'll get a good laugh out of it.
But the idea is that you see the constraints
where they have three choices, and you're able
to account to every single one of them and make it work in your favor,
even if it is going to get you punched in the face.
Another one, this is a classic effect. There's a
queen's holdout. So if you were to have four queens,
what you can do is you can get these
sleeve garters. You can even do it with a rolled cuff.
But essentially, you put these queens
in your sleeve garter. They're pinned to your arm, and you spread
them like so. And I'll put them in a specific
order. It's called chased order. It's clubs, hearts,
spades, and diamonds. And all you do is
you have these on your sleeve, pinned,
and in an effect, you can have a queen
freely named and claim it's in your pocket. And
when you open up your jacket, instead of reaching into the pocket,
you reach into the sleeve, and
you can feel the index and easily
pull out whatever specific queen it is,
deposit it in your pocket as you're opening up your body language a little more,
revealing the queen. And of course,
the first thing that's going to happen is people are going to say,
there's more than one queen in there. So you can easily
empty that pocket completely. Then they might imply that
you have a queen in each pocket, and you're just going to change pockets,
which you can also easily disprove. And this is a good example
of an out, because they feel like
everything is clean, everything's happening into a single location,
but you've been able to determine
that there are four choices.
One of them has to end up here,
and you know a way to account for all of them,
whether it's through verbiage or it's through a physical manipulation,
albeit this one is very simple.
And then this is a classic, classic
in Magic.
You have them name any card, and you
weren't ready for the one they named. Often,
what I'll do is I will stack my deck,
but not in all 52 kind of way.
I will do something like a Queen of Hearts on top,
and like a Jack of Spades on the bottom, and then maybe in my pocket
I might have an Ace of Spades.
And I just have a mental catalog of what cards
get named the most. Usually
one of those, sometimes like a King of Clubs might get thrown in there.
And it depends on the person, really.
But if I'm ready with that Queen of Hearts on top, and I have
something that can blow someone's mind
if I have them name a card that I know is on the top of the deck,
then if they name it, great. If they name one of the other cards
in a different position, I work with that.
But if they don't name anything, it's not like
there's this massive failure. You don't know what my intention was.
If you went ahead and you
named the Nine of Spades, then I just go ahead and go,
okay, we'll use your free selected card. This is the one you were thinking about.
Now let's work with this. There's no force
in there. There's nothing that can make them go, oh, that was weird.
It's just, I'm having you select a card. You don't know
what's about to happen. And that's something that happens a lot in magic
is this concept of don't run
when no one is chasing you. And I feel like social
engineering can really gather a lot
from that because
when you're nervous, when you are
trying to make excuses for everything, when something doesn't work
exactly how you want it, that's when things fall
apart. People
are weird. People are just inherently
weird. And take advantage of
that. So no one is a mind reader. No one can see
exactly what you're about to do. Don't run
when you're not being chased. Let's go ahead and get to
the next section. This is the IRL application
of multiple outs. Originally,
I said this as a joke, but Batman is the master
of multiple outs, even the Adam West one.
And if you see here, he has both
he's clearly being attacked by a shark
but he's ready because he knows, he's like, I'm going to be
attacked by a manta ray repellent, by manta rays, or I'm going to be
attacked by a shark. And so he has repellents for both.
And if both of those don't work, then he has fists.
Batman is the king of multiple outs.
He is always ready for different scenarios, whether
it's Joker toxins, or maybe just
throwing someone off a building. Who cares? He's Batman.
But in actual real life, if we go to the
next slide, the IRL
applications of multiple outs, a really
good example that I've used
when I've done phishing attacks on
on jobs is
multi-layer phishing attacks. More often than not, a phishing
attack is, here's my website, I want
someone to go to it, and I want them to get tricked into going
in, and I want them to try to
type in their information, and I want them to send it to me, and I want to log it.
No.
Phishing attacks need to get way more sophisticated.
And through multiple outs, you could easily
do that. So if you think about it,
you need to figure out what are all your
constraints, and how can you have an outcome that serves you the best.
So if you take phishing websites, for example,
think about the outcomes. One, they
leave immediately. Two, they type in their
info, then they read the URL at the last second,
and then they leave. Or three, they fall for it completely,
and then they send you your information.
All of those...
the only one that wins is the very last case.
But if you think about it,
what if you actually, when they type in their info,
you have a JavaScript keylogger that is taking note of
everything they're sending, and it's sending it off to
a command server. Every time.
Anytime you make a phishing website, put a keylogger on it.
Because I have gone onto websites plenty of times,
I start typing my username and password, and then the
oh shit moment hits, and then I read the URL, realize I'm fine,
and then I keep going. But if there was a keylogger
on that, I'd be fucked.
That would not be okay.
And then also, another way to serve yourself
a little bit better, if someone leaves
immediately, instead of letting them just
leave immediately, why not attempt to have a
JavaScript popup that uses
some identifiable trademark language
or a company name information from your
target, and it says, hey, we just
detected that this is a phishing website.
Go ahead and fill in this form
with your name or your email or your phone and your
extension. Get privileged information.
You might not get credentials,
but privileged information is also gold. Not everyone
has an easy-to-access company directory where you can
start flexing around and getting stuff like this. You can even have
when they try to leave a JavaScript popup that says,
great job, this is an internal test from the company.
You passed our security audit. Congratulations. Fill in this
form so we can make sure that your manager knows.
Boom. Taking advantage of that
desire to build and feel good about themselves,
you've given them more, and
all of these options are way better than
it either works or it doesn't.
And then, of course, there's the option that they might be able to
realize that there's a scam within the scam
and you can go as many layers
deep as you want with this. You can even follow up with an email
afterwards and be like, hey, we noticed this, and try to contact them
directly. But ultimately, those
three layers are better than the original one.
And an example of doing this in the physical world
is think about
crash key sets where you have keys for all of
the entry boxes in Los Angeles
or all of the elevator keys.
There have been so many DEF CON talks. There are so many
keys available. Everyone
is aware of these. There's also the TSA
key pack. Oh, bless the TSA.
They have made this so easy. They took the constraint of
everyone in an airport
has to have a bag with a lock
that fits this constraint.
What type of outs do you need to have to make sure you can
manage everything in this constraint? The TSA key pack.
You get a copy of each one of those keys
and suddenly you have an out for every single
lock. And this works, of course, for
other different systems. And
you can just kind of view that exercise of
think about challenges in a security scenario
where you say, what are the constraints? How many choices
are there? What are all the permutations of this?
And how many can I realistically have a response to?
And then how many can you do if you're being unrealistic?
Maybe it takes having 400 different
ISP uniforms in a van. Screw it. If it gets you in the
building, it gets you in the building. Basically,
any plan B attacks or additional layers
in real life, that makes for a good
multiple out. Can we get the next slide?
So
stage whispers. This is actually something that's used
in both magic and also just on stage.
Normally, a stage whisper on stage is just like
you're communicating a direction that the audience isn't supposed to know
about it. You can have full conversations on stage
depending on the size of where you're at.
But in magic, a stage whisper is
you call up an audience member.
You don't make a fanfare or anything.
You bring them up. And while you're bringing them up, you look them in the eyes
helping them up and you say, what is your name? But you don't say it loudly.
You don't move your mouth a whole lot. You don't articulate.
They say, I'm John.
And you pull them up and you do a magic trick.
You do whatever, maybe it's a mentalism piece.
And you're doing your mentalism piece and then you say
and your name is John.
And everyone loses their mind when they nod because
you've just figured out their name.
And then you quickly have to hush them because
you're like, no, this isn't where the magic begins.
I'm more magical than this.
And to John, it just looks like you're telling them, oh no, that wasn't actually magic.
But this is an example of a dual reality.
This is where the audience thinks one very specific thing
and John is aware of a completely different thing.
But the thing is, is that you don't want John
to be in on it.
You want him to be an unwilling participant.
And you're doing this with an ambiguity of language.
You're doing this with an ambiguity of knowledge.
Another effect, and this is a classic thing,
you have a box set aside.
You have a watch, a knife, and a card.
And on the card, it simply says, I have the card,
you have the knife, the watch is in the box.
It's very simple.
And you place these objects. You let your audience member shuffle them around.
Your person that you're doing this is great for one-on-one.
And you say, put both hands on any two of these objects.
The box is set aside. It's not part of this.
And let's say they put their hands
on the knife and the card.
And you go ahead and you say,
okay, hand one of those to me and you take one,
leaving the watch on the table and you go ahead and just put it in the box.
If they get the card, you say, read what the card says.
And then they read it out loud and all of the qualifications for it are true.
If you end up with the card, you simply read it out loud.
And all the qualifications are true because it's from your perspective.
The only instance where it gets a little weird
is if they put both of their hands on the watch
and one of the other objects. But you say,
okay, now go ahead and lift up one of your hands.
And if they lift up the hand
that's on the knife, you can go ahead
and say, okay, we'll set these aside.
And then the watch, I want you to put that in the box.
If they lift their hand off of the watch,
you say, okay, we'll discard the watch. And this gets back
into the idea of you don't want to do the same trick twice
because this is a perfect example of if someone watches this twice,
it's instantly going to fall apart. But
if you can present this well and you can present
your equivocate well and your method for it and your language
and your confidence in it and how much you believe
what you say is happening is happening, it becomes
the truth. It's no longer optional. It is
the truth. And that's why magic
magicians like Aaron Brown are so effective
because when he speaks, it's the truth.
And that's absolutely wonderful.
And then another effect is called
ashen hand. Earlier I did a slide
where I asked if someone's right-handed or left-handed and it didn't
matter. The reason for this is
for an effect called ashen hand. What you do is you have
someone put both of their hands out flat like this. And all you do
is you grab their hand and you adjust them a little bit like this. You maybe
move it lower or higher. You give some bullshit stage direction.
And what you're doing is you're secretly
depositing a little bit of ash on your finger onto
their left hand. You can do it on their right. It doesn't really matter.
But you're going to force one of those hands with an equivocate.
And so let's say you put it on their right.
So you smudge it on their right hand and their hands are like this.
You've moved them. They now have a smudge. You are now completely hands-free.
And then you say, are you right-handed or left-handed?
And this is where that choice makes it seem like they have full
control over the situation. They say, I'm left-handed. You say,
okay, great. We want to use your weak hand. So we're going to use your
right hand. And go ahead and drop your left hand.
They leave it out. If they say, I'm right-handed. You say,
okay, leave your right hand out and drop your left.
You have them make a fist. And from here,
all you have to do is take a little bit of ash
and you sprinkle it on the back of their hands and rub it in until it
vanishes. That's not the magic.
But you can play that up.
Whatever your character, whatever your writing is.
But then you say that the ash has gone through their hand and has ended up
inside of their palm and they open up and then they have ash
inside of their hand. And the reason why this is magical is
because you've been stepped away.
Even if they remember the actual fact that they made a choice of which
hand, it's couldn't...
because it's not on both hands. It's only on the one. And you never
touched them because you've made this memory
of, hey, you're fucking up. I'm helping you here.
They're going to wipe that. And that's a perfect
example of taking that snapshot as well
as using an equivocate and that vague intent
on your question to make them
follow instructions with you a little bit better.
If we can go ahead to the next slide.
Real life applications of equivocate.
Honestly,
equivocates are best for inferred information.
On a job, let's say you notice on Facebook the big boss
had a barbecue. You're doing some big
red team thing. And you want everyone to...
you've done a bunch of research. You know the guy that runs the building
or whatever. His name is Bob. And you can now
weaponize the fact that he had a barbecue that weekend because
while you're building rapport with one of
your targets, you can say, hey, were you at Bob's barbecue?
And they have two realistic responses. They can either say yes or they can
say no. And by leveraging this, because of this vague
intent, this vague language, you can make it seem like you're either
invited but didn't go, which makes that person
your equal instantly because you're now... they were invited
to the barbecue. So were you. And if they
didn't know about it or they didn't go, you can now be their
superior. You are now the person that's friends with the big boss
and they aren't. And suddenly
this relationship dynamic, one, you've inserted
yourself close to someone that they're
supposed to respect and be under. But also
you have given yourself a history.
You have a background story just from one single piece of
information and a vague question.
And more often than not, though, in magic
you leverage your social position to get away with
equivocates. It allows you to get away with things that might not make sense.
But when it comes to influencing people's choices in real
life using equivocate, people say no and they'll walk away.
You can't make realistic situations
by forcing people to choose things with equivocates.
It's very weird. But you can get away with it,
but you have to be a bit of a jerk and you have to write it
off as a misunderstanding later and you have to act quickly.
An example of doing this with
an ambiguous intent is, I don't know how many people know
about the trick of asking when your partner says, hey, I'm
hungry, you say, and instead of saying, okay, where do you want
to go eat? You say, I already know where I want to take you, but you have to guess.
And then they do. And instead of being like, oh,
you're right, you just take them there because you use this
ambiguous intent. They don't know
any of the information that you know, but it's basically
just a big lie to get them to give you more information.
And sometimes people don't even know it themselves.
And another way
I've noticed equivocate in real life is in dark patterns.
A lot of them, if you're not familiar with what a dark pattern is
on the Internet, is when a UI
is creating language
or is creating a UI experience
around sometimes preventing you
from doing something or trying to mitigate
the amount of people doing a specific action.
Like, I don't know if you've ever tried to cancel an Amazon account,
but there's like 16 menus to go through. And it's ridiculous.
And that's the dark pattern. And a quick dark pattern here
is do not uncheck this box
if you wish to be contacted via about product updates,
upgraded special offers, and pricing. It doesn't make sense.
It's confusing. It's vague. It's ambiguous.
And it's how they're preventing you from doing
an action, which is unsubscribing, which is something that they don't want you to do.
And actually, even in our game,
which if you haven't had a chance to check out the Rogues Village game,
go for it. It's beautiful, lots of fun.
But we have an Equivoque Easter egg hidden there.
You're asked what one of your strengths are.
And regardless of what you respond with,
we're always going to give you the same item because we're either going to
bolster your weaknesses or we're going to enhance
your strength. And it doesn't matter, but it's an Equivoque,
but you feel like you have a free choice, but both
paths lead to the same road. And
once again, it comes down to those constraints. You're figuring
out what paths you have available to you and how can you merge them
in a direction that you want. And let's
go ahead and get to the takeaways.
Forces are
direct decisions that the target has zero control in.
This is good for direct attacks that
introduce a specific object. For example,
if you're using a switch bag for getting in a piece of hardware
or maybe forcing a value on
something like a contest or a lottery, multiple
outs are fully free selections that you
cannot control. You can't control the amount of
constraints. You can accept them, but you can be prepared
for them. And this is good for having responses for a narrow
selection of answers. For example,
a deck of cards is a 52 question
object. And
once you can figure out how to mitigate those 52
questions, it becomes a lot easier to deal with. And
equivocates, they're for creating ambiguity around definitions,
allowing your will to be imposed on a target.
Equivocates aren't perfect,
but it allows you to enhance
your percentages. And it's great
for warping decisions or creating
inferred knowledge. And the next slide,
this is the defensive takeaways. I think this is something that
everyone can actually
gather something from, whether you're in security, whether
you're in magic, or you're just a plain Joe.
Because scams exist everywhere.
But also, please don't ever do this to magicians. I beg
of you. If I have someone do this to me and I'm doing a magic trick and it turns
out they saw this talk, I'm going to be very sad.
But forces, if you feel like you didn't have a free choice,
attempt to make another one where you can
change the rules of the selection. Be prepared for an
out. Always be ready to
try to change your choice. If you're at that car lot and they say,
here's the green Subaru. And you can say, let me look at another
green Subaru. And if they're really antsy about that,
maybe just leave. You're
an adult. Go buy a car somewhere else.
Multiple outs. Go through the
scenarios. What were your actual choices here?
Because maybe you're actually in a force. Maybe you're
in an equivocate. But go through your scenarios
and see if it's possible to prepare for each of them.
And if that intent on that preparation could be negative to you.
And like I said,
try to change your mind. Try to change the rules.
If you can change the rules or you can change your mind, you have a lot more
freedom. But also,
chances that you can never be 100% sure. So always
be able to stand your ground and redact.
In equivocates, when you're given vague decisions,
verify the intent of the question and what
responses will be used for.
So if you get a weird question and it
seems very open-ended and weird and it's not from someone you trust,
clarify what they want to use
the answer for. You don't have to answer questions.
You don't have to answer someone you've never met
who's asking you in an elevator if you went to Bob's BBQ.
You can say, what does it matter to you, guy? I don't know you.
That's my purse. Get away from here.
Always validate. And that's pretty much it.
If you can validate, if you can change your mind, if you can change
the rules or
what gives you your selection of answers,
you'll be safe. Or safer, as it were.
And I think that's pretty much it. Yeah, I think I'm ready
for my Q&A, Jay.
So first up,
0x90, in your experience,
what is the percentage of time that somebody uses
some of the defense mechanisms you discussed?
Yeah,
when it comes to doing this in a magic scenario,
it really
depends on how you're approaching.
I've noticed that if you treat anything that you're doing
in magic like a puzzle, people will shut down
and they will inherently get defensive
and they will not want to interact. Where if you haven't
selected a card, they'll wait until the very end because they don't trust you
and it's because you haven't built up rapport.
So it's a case-by-case scenario.
It happens on an individual basis.
The longer I've been doing magic, though,
the less it has happened.
It's gotten to the point for me... I remember when I first started
almost 10 years ago, when I would be doing a trick
and then someone would say,
let me see those cards. And I'd be like, oh, no.
And I would shut down and get all clammy.
And all of a sudden, there goes all the magic.
But now, I could have something that I'm preparing
for hours ahead of time and I have every single card exactly where I need it.
If someone says, whatever, magic boy, let me see that deck,
I want to shuffle it, and it's not a show where I can tell them to go
screw themselves, I'm going to hand them the deck and say,
okay, shuffle it, and I will change my entire set
just to preserve that magic.
But basically,
short answer, as you get better, the longer you do it,
it happens less and less. It was at a point where it was maybe
1 out of 10 people, and now
maybe if I'm performing a lot, it might happen
once a month. But it really depends on
how able you're to disarm your people
and how much you can connect with them. Because if you're
their friend before you start doing magic, they're not going to be
a jerk to their friend.
Someone asked the question, are you right-handed or left-handed?
I am right-handed.
I don't know exactly how
the screen stuff is set up, so it might appear
that this is my left hand, but I am right-handed.
And we have a question
for you, another one. What kind of ash is it
that you're talking about? Something special or just burnt paper?
Do you make the ash yourself?
Actually, this is a classic impromptu effect.
You used to do it originally with a cigar ash.
The reason why it was neat is because you could just
quickly dip your thumb in an ash tray,
which is disgusting if it's public, but you know,
it's magic. We do disgusting stuff sometimes.
And then you can just sit at a party with your thumb behind your hand
as you're gesticulating and talking to people.
And you can go ahead and do the effect that way.
But basically, cigarette ash.
You might potentially want to do this a different way.
There are a couple of other effects that have
taken this approach and they are published
and they're still currently manufactured. So if you want to
go ahead and DM me, I'll actually give you a link
to the product. I don't make anything off of it. I just don't
want to imply that it uses the same equivocate and stuff
because I didn't make the effect itself.
But it's very good and it's modern. You've probably seen it on
AGT. It's great.
We have one person
that is claiming you as a Fed.
Oh, who's claiming me as a Fed?
What's their social security number?
No, I'm not a Fed.
I have way too much hair.
I have so much hair, especially for being a Fed,
that you can't actually tell that I'm wearing Bose headphones.
Like the full ear cup.
Feds don't have this much hair.
But no, I'm not a Fed.
I'm a software engineer. I've done some security contract stuff.
Ultimately...
If you want to find me on Twitter, DM me and I'll
send you my page. And you can be very disappointed.
That's beautiful.
I'm going to wait for one more question
that's coming in.
I think we can probably just field that on the Discord.
I'm going to give them 10 seconds to get a 10, 9, 8, 7, 6...
I mean, Jade's typing.
Oh, okay. Alright.
Ooh, AngelRain's typing.
Maybe if I just keep saying people are typing, I'll get more and more.
Maybe they'll just start typing and never fill it.
Alright, to what extent
admitting a failure can be used as an out?
So, I wouldn't ever consider
a flat-out failure as an out.
There have been times where I have
set up for an effect
and you're so far in it.
It's like where you're at the table and you need to turn over the card
and it has to be your thing. And there have been some times
years ago
where I've turned that card over and it's the wrong thing
and there's just no way of getting back to it.
And I say, ladies and gentlemen, this is theater. It's live.
I am so sorry.
This is a fuck up.
And every magician this has happened to.
But ideally, if you have
even the smallest window
or where you can be clever about something
you rarely have to accept failure.
If I'm doing something that is dramatic
and there is a lot of intention and emotion
behind a certain moment or meaning behind something
artistically, I make the decision
to take the fall and the full blame of it.
Similar to singing a horrible note
on stage and you just kind of go
I'm sorry, but I have my artistic integrity
and I'm not going to do jazz magic over this to try to recover.
I think
that might be it.
But thank you 0x90.
Oh wait, sorry, this will be the last one.
And then we'll cut it after this so we can feel them in the Discord.
But this is a good one to end with. Who inspires you the most?
Jeez.
This is a really, really good question.
I have a couple of answers for this
but just to keep this short
I would have to say the late Ricky Jay
and the late Johnny Thompson.
Both different worlds, different styles of performing
but reading
Ricky's depth of knowledge
and how much he
is passionate about his craft
and elevating it to the level of art is beautiful to me
and Johnny Thompson being this
encyclopedia of magic where he knows just about everything
and he's very good and cares about things deeply
but they approach it differently.
Johnny Thompson is about making sure people are
entertained and doing it well
and Ricky Jay is about the
total experience of theater
and he sees this theater that he alone sees in his head.
It's just him. And he has this idea of what makes it perfect
and he's very aggressive about it and I love it.
Sorry, I lied to you. Last one.
But AOD wants you to speak to the idea
that a magician can sneak out of a failure
because the audience doesn't know
exactly what's supposed to happen.
Yeah, exactly.
Don't run when no one's chasing you.
If I pull out a card
and it's like the reveal
and I know it's not it. I figured it out.
That is not it.
You can attempt to backtrack.
There are effects.
There's a thing called an invisible deck.
It's wonderful and it allows you
to summon any card
For example, if you ever screw up so badly
that it's irredeemable, you can keep something like that on your person
and just be like, well, actually I did this.
And then you did this whole other effect.
You can always move on to something else.
No one knows that you're about to have the card come to the top of the deck
47 times in a row. Maybe on the 22nd one
you screw it up
and you can just move into something else.
You can just make a joke about it and be like, I guess it died after 21
and move on. And it depends on your personality.
And honestly, the calmer you are
the more ready you are to accept
something getting screwed up and just moving on with it
people will never remember it. People seldom
I have come off of
so many performances where I screwed one thing up
and I had to recover like that
and it affects me to the point where
I become so upset
like I need hours by myself to think about
how I'm such an idiot and I screwed something up
and I've never had a single person ever point it out
and even professional magicians
I'm like, yeah, but I did this and I screwed this thing up
and they're like, oh, I thought you were just going into this effect that way.
I had no clue. No one cares. No one's chasing you.
Awesome.
That will conclude our Q&A portion for this talk.
Thank you, RX980, for everything.
Yeah, thank you.