Coming up next is the badge talk. This is always one of my favorite talks every DEF CON.
And we're running a little bit late so I'll just get right to it. So coming up to the stage we've
got DT and MK Factor which is Michael and Katie.
Okay. I can't get you from up here so I'll take my mask off. You're safe. Hey, welcome to
DEF CON 30.
As you can imagine, it has been a very tumultuous, crazy, crazy pants year.
And we are all super duper excited to actually be here.
And when I started seeing everybody around, it's like this huge sense of relief. And I'm not going to lie.
After I'm done with this talk, I don't care if the place burns down.
I got it. We got it done. We got it here.
It doesn't matter if it only lasts for a couple of hours.
So normally what we do in this talk is I kind of welcome everybody.
Just give you a quick overview of some of the challenges of organizing the con.
And then we go right into the challenges of actually creating the badge.
What I hope most of you are wearing.
With the badge designers, MK Factor.
And yeah.
This year you've got some pretty good stories.
One was the most impressive was sort of I'm living in Singapore.
There in Utah.
And the time zone is terrible.
Difference.
And for me it's like the morning and they're in the middle of the night.
And they're like we found this one chip and we need to order the chip right now.
And yeah. People were.
Anyway.
Good stories coming up.
Stay tuned.
So what we try to do with the badge is we try to make it interactive.
We try to make it collaborative.
We try to force you with mind control to use it to socially interact with others around you.
One more way for you to make an unexpected connection with fellow hacker.
And originally all the badges were simple.
Paper, plastic, metal.
And we always put a lot of time in trying to make them more counterfeit resistant.
Because after a few years people started copying them.
And because we don't take corporate sponsorship, the only way we make money is through selling badges and T-shirts.
And if that gets undermined, we don't have any other resources, you know, any other revenue to fall back on.
So it turned into this cat and mouse game where the people counterfeiting would get better and better.
And we'd get better and better.
And finally they got so good.
It's like, you know, I don't mind if you can really counterfeit it at that level.
Because there's only like three of you that can.
And why don't you give talks and tell us how you did it?
Because it was really, I mean, they were like melting records in ovens and smudging things to get a reflection.
I mean, they were doing some really cool stuff.
So every once in a while you'll see a display or you'll see a contest about it.
Like a badge counterfeiting contest.
And then at some point we realized that we shouldn't put all of our energy into the anti-counterfeiting.
And we started to, Joe Grand, I was talking to Joe years ago.
And we were lamenting that if the end of the world was coming, if Skynet was going to wake up, we need like an army of hackers to do battle against Skynet.
Except everybody is doing software.
Nobody can hack the hardware of Skynet.
And Joe was one of the only hardware hackers I knew at the time.
And so we needed to build an army, right, to defend the world against Skynet.
So how do we get hackers more interested in hardware?
And we created, he designed and we did the first electronic badge for hacking conference at DEF CON.
And it was super, super simple by today's standards.
But every year it got more complicated and better.
And we knew tricks.
And back then a lot of things were happening.
It was aluminum PCB.
It was persistence of vision LEDs.
It was infrared communication.
And it just took off.
And now badge life, everybody, I think we helped accelerate the skill set to defend against Skynet.
So thank you, DEF CON attendees, for jumping on board.
And now the badges are so complicated out there that other people are creating.
Honestly, it's too costly to really compete with some of them.
We can't do a $100 badge.
We have some limitations.
And so it becomes more important for us on how to interact.
All right?
The ideas behind them.
And maybe not the super-duper build.
So it's been really fun.
It's sort of like launching something into the world and now it's sort of outgrown us a little bit.
And so now we're just trying to help inspire and get more people involved.
It's not supposed to be counterfeit proof.
It's not supposed to be unhackable.
It's intentionally hackable.
So that's sort of the idea with the badges.
And normally we alternate between a paper badge, meaning a physical non-electronic badge, and an electronic badge.
And even years are normally physical.
And odd years are normally electronic.
And that's to help save us some money because they're so expensive to do.
But how can you not have an electronic badge for DEF CON 30?
You've got to have one.
So we had an electronic badge last year.
We had an electronic badge this year.
We haven't figured out what we're doing next year yet.
Maybe you can do a mechanical computing badge.
Like an old Curta calculator or slide rule badge.
Don't test me.
You might be wearing one next year.
All right.
So with that said, I would like to introduce the badge team that was responsible for this wonderful experience.
And later on we have other interactive ‑‑ Zebler has created some interactive badge stations you'll see around where you can plug in your badge.
You can go head to head and chill out rooms battling each other.
There's some contests.
So there's some installation art stuff you can do with your badges, too.
We want it to be fun.
Okay.
With that, I'd like to introduce the M and the K.
While he's fiddling around, maybe just tell him some stories about the background of the idea.
Yeah.
So I guess we can talk about some of the ideas behind the badge.
So you want to talk?
You want to tell the story?
Sure.
Yeah.
So last year I was talking to someone and he's like, wouldn't it be cool to have a musical badge?
And I was like, yeah, that would.
I would really love that idea.
And so we sat on it and we thought about it.
We also love the show Bob's Burgers.
And Gene has a sampling keyboard.
Which ‑‑
Thank you.
So Gene has a sampling keyboard, which we'll see in a second, that he loves to make sounds with.
And we're like, what's the better way to capture the sounds of DEF CON with a sampling keyboard?
Yeah.
All right.
First thing we want to do is thank all the people that came and helped us assemble these badges and helped us create them.
Oh, my gosh.
So many people that helped.
It was amazing.
We have really great friends and family in the community.
It's just amazing.
Thank you, everyone.
Thank you so much.
We would not have made it without you.
All right.
So let's talk about the problem with the badges.
I'm sure some of you have run into this.
And I apologize.
So there is a terrible, terrible, stupid design flaw in the badge.
I take full responsibility for that.
So.
The problem is this little, little bitty chip that's under the little cover board.
And that's the audio amplifier.
And what happens is that amplifier is designed to power a speaker.
And it does that really, really well.
What it's not designed to do is be connected to an audio output.
And while I want to, you know, make excuses and whatnot, and there are excuses, right?
We had to change this last minute.
And supply chain being what it was, we could only get certain things and fit it in budget and everything.
And I did not check that if this was going to be a problem.
And so it became a problem.
And that's the chip that burns out.
This is what's under that chip.
It is a 9-pin BGA flip chip.
It's pretty much microscopic.
It's like one and a half millimeters square.
It's ridiculous.
So if you have hurt your badge.
HAP.
HV does have some spare chips.
If your board is not too badly damaged, they would be happy to help you fix your badge.
Don't bring them and say fix my badge.
That's not going to happen.
So be willing to learn and help do that.
The other thing we found out when we got here is the lanyards can cause problems.
And we did not know this because we didn't have the lanyards.
We didn't see them until we got here a few days ago.
And we didn't think they were that close to the hole?
Or they would be big enough?
Yeah.
That lanyard connector is the perfect size to wrap around that connector and just short it out.
Ta-da.
So tape over that if you can.
We've got tape if you find us.
Yeah.
So with that out of the way.
This is our original concept design.
So this is one of them.
So we went through several different ideas.
Originally it was going to be super simple.
Right?
Because that's how you first start your badge.
And then you're like, wait, I need this.
And now I need this.
But honestly it was literally going to be four buttons and a screen and then your keyboard.
That didn't happen.
But we had hopes.
So, yeah.
Like we said, Gene, he has a sampling keyboard.
And so we were really excited when he's like, we should buy these and play with them and see how they work and see if this is really our idea we want.
And so here's our kids.
They're like, this is the coolest thing.
And so we all turned into five and just pounding on these keyboards and having a great time and making sounds and things like that.
And we do have this keyboard with us.
So if you want to play with a real sampling keyboard that works really nicely, come find us in the contest area.
All right.
So artwork.
Last year the theme with the kind of 80s vibe and everything, everything was hard lines and very geometrical.
This year Katie got to run wild with the artwork.
And it's amazing.
Thank you.
Yeah.
I had a lot of fun.
It was kind of cool to just take stuff from different things.
I don't know what else to say.
But enjoy.
It's awesome.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right.
Stock supply chain because it's a problem again.
And will be forever and ever and ever.
So this is one of the stories that DT had started talking about.
When was that?
February?
Yeah.
We reached out to them.
We're like, oh, my gosh, we found a chip that's in stock that's not $10.
We need to buy these now.
And so, yeah, we bought a crazy number of these chips.
It was crazy.
It was a really weird circumstance.
So Raspberry Pi has on their site links to all the different distributors that have this chip.
And they one of them was DigiKey, right?
And all these things were sold out everywhere.
And I happened to be searching on DigiKey one night and came across this chip and they had like 50,000 of them in stock.
But the link on Raspberry Pi's website hadn't been updated yet to the new link on DigiKey.
So I was like, this is our moment.
We've got chips.
Before anyone else sees this weird thing, we need to just take these.
These will be ours.
Yeah.
So, yeah, we contacted DT and bought those really quickly.
And to our great surprise, DigiKey actually shipped them.
Well, yeah, I think I kept asking, like, okay, did they go in the shopping basket?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, did it check out?
Did it charge the credit card?
Okay, yeah, we've got them.
Okay.
And then you said on eBay people were marking these things up ten times.
Right?
They would, people would swoop in, see that a chip was in low supply, buy them all, mark it up ten times on eBay.
And so I think several times they'd contact me, like, we found the chip.
Oh, no, they're all gone.
Yeah.
Okay, we have to redesign the whole badge now.
Okay, we've got another chip.
Oh, no, they're all gone.
Okay, now we have to redesign the badge.
It was like, oh, my God.
Yeah, so when we saw this, we're like, we want it, can we have it?
Please let us have this, because all the other ones were smaller, and they were like eight bucks a chip.
And you would have had a board and a chip.
Yeah.
Yeah, and this also did pose some problems, because if any of you have messed with the RP2040, it doesn't have any audio stuff, any DSP stuff.
It doesn't have floating point stuff.
So it was a bit of a challenge programming wise.
All the audio on your badge is all in software.
It's a good thing that chip is fast.
But even so, it's still 8 bit audio.
So that was a compromise.
But it works.
So custom parts, the screen, I don't know if any of you have played with those little OLED screens.
Normally they've got a big, long, flexible connector, and it's to wrap around the back of a board and be soldered there.
That didn't work for us.
Because everything needed to be on the front side of the board.
And no one made that screen with a short enough cable on it.
And one that goes in a connector rather than soldered, because we were not soldering that many screens.
And so we contacted a supplier and got those screens custom made with a very short little flexible cable on them.
So they're custom.
You can't get your own.
They're fancy.
So yeah.
One of the cool things you can do when you're ordering many crazy numbers of things, you can get custom stuff.
Kind of fun.
So then parts started arriving at our house.
We don't have a big house.
It was everywhere.
So these bins hold 4,000 audio cables.
There were many more of these off screen.
And they were heavy.
DT, are we on?
Are you allowed to say how many we made?
Yeah, I think so.
Okay.
So 25,000 is the number of badges we made.
So there were many of these buckets.
Yeah, two pallets of boxes just to hold them all.
So batteries, yeah.
25,000 badges.
25,000 AAAs were delivered to our house.
The poor Amazon man.
He's constantly like, what are these?
And he's like lugging these giant things.
They were small boxes, but they were packed a punch.
Yeah.
So one of the things that happened is we got the battery holders and the batteries, right?
We ordered all the stuff for the badges all at the same time.
And so a lot of the parts and the circuit boards and everything, those go to an assembly house.
And then the batteries go to our house.
And then the batteries and battery holders came to us.
And so we had some time.
So we prefilled the two batteries on every single one of those battery holders.
And this picture on the right, I don't know if any of you noticed, that's not right.
So when you order this many of something, you start finding the weird ones.
So about one in every thousand battery holders was malformed or put together backwards.
Weird, crazy stuff you find.
Yeah.
I don't think our kids will ever want to see a battery again.
Yeah.
So they had a blast opening the batteries.
I walk in the kitchen, and they're like, we made a pyramid.
So, yeah, for reference, each of those boxes is 50 batteries.
That's 8,500 batteries.
So just over 10%.
They were everywhere.
Yeah.
And we made some custom tools.
So those battery holders have, like, in them, you know, a lot of stuff.
And we had a bunch of long pins sticking out of them.
And we were not going to cut 50,000 pins by hand.
Not going to happen.
So I bought some metal shears at Harbor Freight and 3D printed a little jig for it.
And so we could just slide them through and cut all the leads off the battery packs.
That was fun.
Yeah, it was way fun.
There was metal everywhere.
It's fine.
And jigs.
So we designed and custom printed little jigs to bend the top boards enough to get them into the badges without having to manually bend each one over.
I don't know if any of you tried to do that with your hands.
Yeah.
It's not fun.
I physically can't.
And so I was like, we need something, because I cannot do this 25,000 times.
So he's kind of amazing and did that for us.
And if any of you need help with that, I've got some of these jigs over here.
So I can help you put the top board back on or flip it over if you want.
Yep.
Assembly.
PCBX is amazing.
They did all the assembly on these boards.
They're based out of Ohio.
And they are awesome.
This is what they dealt with.
This is what got delivered to them.
Bare circuit boards.
It's like 1,800 pounds of circuit boards.
It's ridiculous.
And so, yeah.
We assembled all of these, put them in anti-static bags, shipped them to us.
Isn't it pretty?
Okay.
So once we got to assembly, we had to take them all out of their static bags.
All 25,000 of them.
And then we, as you can tell, the Jeffs were awesome.
They taught us how to, like, do it faster.
So we had, like, them everywhere.
And we were constantly unloading boxes.
And we had static bags everywhere.
So our next part of assembly, we had to do soldering.
We soldered all of those battery packs back on, like, onto the backs of these.
So we did 50,000 solder joints.
It was great.
It was fun.
Our kids got really good at soldering.
Yep.
.
.
And, of course, our good friends, Troy and Burleigh, they graciously, you know, offered their house as well for assembly.
So they did thousands and thousands of them at their house as well and had them everywhere.
Yeah.
Both houses looked very similar.
Boxes everywhere and badges everywhere.
Yeah.
So many badges.
Like, that's a couple hundred on that table.
25,000 is a ridiculous number.
.
Yeah.
I think that's only 300 on that table.
They were bigger than we were expecting.
.
So our top boards for the human came as panels.
And we had to break them all apart.
So this is me and my mom sitting there breaking.
We also have they did it at their house as well.
Yep.
There was breaking everywhere.
I did not see this picture until today that they used pliers.
I was, like, jealous.
We used our hands.
.
But, yeah, that was a fun.
There was fiberglass everywhere.
Mm-hmm.
So, yeah, one of our kids breaking more boards.
Heat sealing and putting little cuts in every bag so you guys could rip them apart, rip them open easily.
.
Yeah.
It's just ridiculous.
.
So these are just some of the people that came to help.
They were our friends, family, community.
We had just so many people.
.
Like for three, four weeks?
.
Yeah.
Yeah, four weeks of assembly.
It was ridiculous.
I don't think I want to go in my shop for the next, like, month and I'd be happy.
.
Yeah.
Yeah, they had smiles until the end-ish.
.
When we said smile for the picture.
.
So when we got to the den, we're, like, oh, that's a lot of badges.
Like, that's more badges than we thought.
And we're, like, we're going to need 100 boxes.
We don't have a car that can do that.
.
Yeah.
So each box of 250 is about 60 pounds.
So we loaded about 6,000 pounds worth of boxes in this U-Haul and dragged it down here.
It was great.
So for those of you who saw this picture on Twitter, I love the guesses.
You were all way wrong.
.
But it was fun.
We had lots of guesses around 13,000, 14,000.
We had the 30,000 guess.
But, yeah, 25,000.
.
And badge challenge.
I hope a bunch of you have started playing that and having fun.
Today you can actually do more with it because contest is open.
So these lovely ladies this morning, we went to set up our challenge table in the contest area, and our boxes of stuff were gone.
They were not where they were supposed to be.
Someone took them to the hardware house.
They were in our hacking village in the Flamingo.
I don't know why.
It's okay.
It happens.
These lovely ladies ran and got them and brought them back to us.
It was fun.
It was good.
We got our cardio in and a lot of sweating.
So huge thank you to Redacted who helped with the badge challenge and all the hardware set up for that.
It's awesome.
Please go play with it and have fun.
On the badge challenge.
Don't make real phone calls.
There are special phones for you to use.
Don't call people and make them mad.
.
Yeah, I'm sure people have been called.
But don't do that anymore.
.
Those poor inspecting people.
Okay.
So that's what we've got.
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handy so we have some don't you know mob us but we have some available I think HHV has a small
selection of them and a lot of SEO designers provided them with their essays thank you any
other questions so you mentioned as you were starting this the story before the slides came
up you mentioned that you had heard yeah wouldn't a musical badge be be interesting so was it just
I mean why did you choose the keyboard because of you know the show that made it exciting to
you or was there something about the music that really you know
drew you into it differently you know why are we doing it with the keyboard versus any of the
other types of music options you had so coming to the design choice so we had several different
ideas we thought like guitar hero kind of thing like where everyone had a different instrument
opposed to building like making it harder for us to have custom things to help us put the badges
together
but generally we we landed on the keyboard I felt like it was more relatable for everyone like
everyone's touched keys on a keyboard before you know what I mean and so I think more people are
willing to I don't know I think that's where it was the sampling was a really big part of it so
the people could record their own sounds and play them and you know add their own sounds to DEF CON I
know if you end up incorporating those with the program I think that's kind of the only prior
individual project that was important to me and again it was it pretty difficult to
me and again I was a lesson teacher and I don't think that's happened much really
when you get the book to the store or find it for the baloris take it home and bring it here okay so
yeah I think people just be like from style when it comes to�
people so other than the the white black ones like red is for goon there's some for all the
different people that help run the conference basically you got your speaker you got CFP you
have press you have contests village vendor vendor so there's nine different colors does
that answer your question and they all have something different on them hey so this is
my first DEF CON I just wanted to say for me personally I love the I love the keyboard this
there you couldn't have picked a better themed badge for me personally and I just wanted to
say thank you for all the effort that's an incredible amount of effort thank you thank you
you got a one one to your to your right there's so many noises or further right but okay so a
two-part question first of all is it possible to reset the challenge to factory-state I know
like when you pull the battery and then put it back in and and start it up it resumed
the challenge to factory-state I know like when you pull the battery and then put it back in and and start it up it resumed
where you were in the in the challenge and secondly do you think it's
theoretically possible to like does the chip have any more capacity to maybe do
like a more advanced synth or anything like that okay so yeah so to reset it
from Raspberry Pi they have you have to file called flash nuke dump that on
there and then
we'll need to we release the firmware not yet I don't think we have we will
throw the firmware up on the badge website so then you can reflash and
that'll put you back to the beginning for the other one there's tons of flash
space left there's not a whole lot of extra processing power available mainly
due to my terrible code I don't know if any of you've noticed if you press like
four more keys at once it kind of hangs there and the screen doesn't update for a
second so yeah we're right at the limit of what it can do with my terrible
coding skills so I was up till 2 in the morning decompiling assembly code so
thank you for that so I've called all my friends but can you actually call
Jenny I mean yeah I can't give too much away but maybe you know there's a
there's a whole area of contests in the venue here so just don't use a real
phone yeah no no real phones don't use your cell phones for it there's a
special any other questions
hey thanks again what was the budget per badge are you allowed to say no we
We don't talk about budget.
Okay, that's fine.
Yeah.
All right.
Thank you.
I'm just curious, can we try what it sounds like
if everybody in this room plays something at the same time?
What'd he say?
Say it one more time, please.
Can we all play something on our badges right now
at the same time to test what it sounds like?
We'll get him.
Let's do it.
What are we all playing?
The final countdown, or?
Oh, it sounds so good.
Freaking hands.
That's awesome.
It's kind of creepy.
All right, all right.
I kind of like it.
Yeah, a little bit creepy.
All right.
I hope to hear the creepy sounds
throughout the whole, like, hotels as well.
I would enjoy that.
Excellent.
Great idea.
Thanks, guys.
Good work, guys.
Thank you.
Hi, folks, how are you?
Good, how are you?
This is my first DEF CON.
Whoo!
Welcome!
So I just came from my first Sky talk,
and it was really interesting.
But on my way up, you know, I got yelled at
and put away my phone for talking, possibly.
And I was just wondering how hard or theoretical would it be
to repurpose it so you can turn this into a recording device in the middle of Sky Talks
because that puts a recording device in every single person's hand here.
I mean, don't do that.
No, I'm just, you know, putting it out there because I brought it up to them
and I looked around and I was just kind of like, holy shit.
So the default programming, you've got three samples, one second each for recording.
So there's not enough memory to hold enough audio.
You could secretly record three seconds.
Okay, so that's good. Good. Thank you.
Thanks for asking questions.
This is five bucks at the show at lunch.
Great. Any other questions?
Oh, right here.
So Awesome Badge.
And when I first saw it, I was like, oh, dang, I should have paid more attention in music classes.
So did you have to do some research in terms of how to read a music sheet or anything like that?
Or were you already musically inclined?
I'm not, but she's musically inclined.
So music's been part of my whole life.
I perform in theater and do musical theater.
And so I was like, I'm happy to do and I play the piano a little bit like this hand really well.
This hand doesn't do so great, but this hand is great.
So I'm happy.
You love me.
I just want to thank the community of Def Con for resharing my final countdown video I posted on on the forum, Lilly the most likes and shares and views I got on all my music.
So I want to thank you guys for just completely just going wild, just resharing that.
So it made it a bit more fun.
a big impact on music, so.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Thanks, sir.
All right, any more questions?
You've only got time for one or two more.
All right, right here.
Hey, awesome, thanks for the badge.
That has been actually pretty fantastic.
This is actually in regards to the badge challenge,
so I guess minor spoilers for some people.
Will the, I guess, the phone system,
or whatever that you guys have on the badge challenge,
will that be made available for post-conference usage?
In case we want to actually complete it.
No, it won't be available after con.
Okay.
We might be able to work something out,
but I wouldn't count on it at this point.
Yeah, one more over there.
Hey, last question.
Run!
How long do you expect the batteries to last for?
Did you test that at all?
We did test the batteries a bit.
It depends on a lot of things.
So just leaving it on, it'll go to sleep after a few minutes,
and that should last pretty much
the duration of the conference.
The more you play with it, the faster it's gonna die.
If you got an SAO, it's really gonna die, so.
And it's all theoretical till you find out.
Yep.
All right, thank you so much for coming to the badge talk.
Thank you.
We'll see you at the con.
Thank you.