Hey everyone, I'm Shannon Morse with DEF CON 30. I'm over here at one of my favorite villages,
the radio frequency village, chatting with Zero Chaos and Rick. We're going to call him Rick M
for today's interview. How are you doing today? I'm doing well, how are you? I'm doing all right,
you know, I'm a little loopy at this time of day, but I'm feeling pretty good, so I'm pretty happy.
We've been setting since six o'clock Tuesday? Yeah, yeah, you know, nobody gets any sleep here.
Fixing the radio frequency stuff. Yeah, that's always an issue.
Especially inside these Faraday cages, I'm sure. Absolutely. So tell me, this is your second time
back since the big pandemic, so... This is our first physical back since the pandemic started.
Okay, perfect. Three years off-site. So I'm sure that you've gone through some big differences as
far as trying to figure out how to still make it like the radio frequency village while you're
doing online conventions. How has that been? And we've kept doing conventions. We've done
six or seven a year since the pandemic started. Yeah. All virtual, but I'll hand it over,
I'll hold over to Ray. Yeah, so we got the same notice everybody else did, right, about DEF CON
going virtual a couple years ago. And we spent an enormous amount of effort to build a virtual
capture the flag that we got off the ground and successful for that. And we've been maintaining
and actually publicly released all the source code to over the past two years. And then we
came back in person and we realized, huh, none of our gears in date anymore. Most of it doesn't
work anymore. And we had to kind of rebuild everything from scratch at the last possible
second and at great expense, but it turned out pretty well. And it's significantly smaller now,
easier to break down, more efficient, but our range of frequencies is now from kilohertz to
high level gigahertz. Really? We're pushing 60 gigahertz on some of our challenges at this point.
So what kind of challenges are you doing this year? So this year we've got all the stuff that
we've been doing, you know, your standard web cracking and WPA cracking and a couple of software
to find radio challenges that are really common. FM broadcast, just a bunch of stuff to get people
started learning how to use their new toys that they got in the vendor village and those kinds
of things. But then this year we added a whole bunch of new stuff for in person. So we've got a
bunch of TPMS, we've got car key fobs, we've got six gigahertz Wi-Fi and 60 gigahertz Wi-Fi.
There's just a very large amount more we can do when we don't have to virtualize it. So the
virtualized stuff is kind of awesome because we more or less run the same code on a bunch of
physical stuff and it's really small and convenient. And then we just buy a bunch of
stuff and bring it and set it up. And that way people have things to look at. There's blinky
lights that everybody likes. And it's a lot more obvious, you know, hey, are they running 60
gigahertz? You take a walk past the table. That sure looks like a 60 gigahertz access point to
me. I guess we should check that out. So it makes it a little more fun because you get to see and
touch more versus the more common stuff that's not as exciting. We've kind of built into little
kids. So this sounds like an excuse to buy really cool, sparkly and shiny things and bring them to
people and do show and tell. Absolutely. The other big part of this, and it's to get some of the
people out of the room more than in the room, is we've increased our foxes dramatically. So we have
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, TPMS, key fob. There's a key fob fox that you actually have to crack a code
and then track the fox based on your correct code. Oh, I want to play. Yeah.
Laura, we have a message in Laura going out called coffee. So if you walk up to somebody
and find coffee, you're finding it over Laura 923.4, I think it is. That's so cool. We're doing
the largest indoor war walking ever. Wow. So that is going to be super exciting. We're really curious
to see. Working with Wiggle's just been amazing. They've helped us to build out a scoring engine.
To track 27 properties throughout Vegas, floor to floor to floor to floor to find 10 hidden foxes.
Wow. And what kind of like prizes are you giving out for CTFs and for the fox hunt? All that good
stuff. So we actually have picked up quite a few sponsors in the last couple of years, which has
been great because our expenses were not non-zero when we went to the cloud. There was obviously
some good money put into that. So we picked up a bunch of sponsors. So the prizes are wide and
varied this year and we're quite excited. We're hoping to give out a whole bunch of really cool
equipment used to play these challenges. We try usually to give out the equipment to the people
who didn't get that challenge. So the less a challenge was won, we kind of seek out that
equipment and give it to people to help get that going more. That's awesome. I really like that.
Our goal is to teach. That's truly what it boils down to. From you guys early days, we've kind of
taken that and run with it as well. We want people to be better at this. We want people to get very
good at doing what they're trying to do. Because they're spending three straight days in here,
they got to get a little bit better with things. So we're constantly giving them
more difficult challenges, more difficult, you know, tests across the board. And Zero Chaos,
can you tell me a little bit about the demos that are going on in here? I know Kentaro
was giving a talk. Yeah, so we've got a full schedule of talks. We've got a whole bunch of
people talking about antenna theory, and, you know, different LoRa mesh networks, and there's
all kinds of really cool stuff. What's really wonderful is because we have such a nice space,
and we've got so many people coming back this year, we're actually doing a couple of meetups
for like people who make war driving rigs, just to get together, talk about what they built,
why they built, what worked, what didn't. And we kind of started up to it's a five minutes on stage
to talk about whatever you built, and then the next person gets to go and talk about what they
built. Yeah. And then when we run out of people to go through, we just kind of sit around and chat
for a while. So it's, it's a great excuse, because you can't do those things when it's remote. Yeah,
we can film a talk, you can look at the camera, and you can do your thing. And it's not the same,
you know, you get together and you get these social moments. And that's what we really,
we really tried to foster that this year. Yeah, we survived off of Discord, but we don't want to
stay on Discord exclusively. And that's been where we've been. I feel like RF has become one of the
cons inside a con that Jeff Moss is advocating about DEF CON. It's a platform for all these
different communities to come together. Absolutely. We're happy to be a part of that. We've been we
were one of the original three villages. So we're still here 15 years later. It's been 15 years.
This is 15. Wow. Geez, dude. I think you're supposed to turn the shirt to the camera.
No, no, you didn't quite. There you go. There we go. 15 years for the wireless village.
That is a very old shirt, sir. It is. It's older than most of our contestants. That's
why he has to keep his arms down. That's right. I don't think there's holes yet.
That's why he has to keep his arms down. There you go. I will keep my arms down.
Well, tell me where can people go if they want to learn more about RF if they want to get involved
with the CTF and the challenges? What's the deal? The number one place to go is definitely
rfhackers.com. You go to the website. You've got links to our discord. You've got links to our
wiki that explain how to play the game. We're running the game both in person and virtual for
Defcon. We're running fully hybrid. So everything that's been available for the last two years is
available to anybody worldwide. And then we do run this a couple of times a year for other
conferences and a couple of times a year because we're bored, right? People have nothing to do
around the holidays and they want something to do. We just spin up the game because why not?
So we give people that chance to play and learn and be a community and have fun.
Is there anything else that y'all would like to add for the community on the internets?
I mean, in the last two weeks, we've enumerated 22.4 million new access points with Wiggle.
Prior to that, we were in second place because the Hard Hat Brigade took on our job and went
forward. So now we own place three, four, and one. They're coming out at us. So we're constantly
trying to get this war driving, trying to get people back to the early days of where all this
started. I mean, if you can't do that, you can't do the next pieces because you can't find the
access point. Yeah, totally. Well, thank you so much for letting me chat with y'all. I really
appreciate it. Rick, ZeroChaos, it's always a pleasure to chat with both of you. And go get
into your shenanigans. Shenanigans away. Oh, we will.