Shmoocon 2008

I’m just returning to work after Shmoocon 2008 – I took Monday off to recover and catch up on sleep.

It seemed like the presenters this year were asked for only overview level subject matter. The talks were relaxed from past year’s research findings – they were more open ended brainstorms and predictions on the implications of known concepts. I’m still glad I went and will be back next year, maybe it was just a slow year for research.

Friday

David Smith’s password analysis talk was really neat. Rss subscribed!

Deviant returned to lock picking after last years gun-nut panel (sorry, not my bag) masked as a physical security panel, and it appealed to everyone I was with. I would have skipped it if it wasn’t a main track talk even though Deviant is a great presenter.

The Gringo Challenge was a great idea that didn’t seem to be given enough attention. I would have preferred vendors in the room where the lock picking stuff was and Deviant’s booth in the main hall with an announcer lining up folks to run through the challenge, all recorded on video. The bloopers would have been great!

Saturday

I underestimated the hotel black-out curtains and missed the morning talk I wanted to see Saturday.

G. Mark‘s A Hacker Looks Past 50 wasn’t a talk I’d planned to attend after really enjoying his talk last year and expecting a repeat as the title hadn’t changed. I obviously don’t know G. Mark. I was in the room for Aaron Higbee and Jaime Fuentes talk on ISP filtering – a brainstorm and what-if session that I did enjoy, and stuck around to see if G. Mark would be telling the same stories again. I couldn’t detect any repeats that weren’t framing a new anecdote. G. Mark has a brilliant literary knack for relating life’s anecdotes to a greater theme, but not without a bit of tangential confusion. Also, someone needs to help him re-do his website! I’d gladly assist – the main nav has two blank pages and a 404, and it is all outdated and full of spacer gifs.

I have to call out the heckler he had. G. Mark was giving away a lot of crap as he usually does, by ticket number. He read a ticket number for an NSA shot glass and a woman behind me was the winner. She didn’t seem too excited that she’d won the shot glass so G. Mark asked “Do you drink?”.

The crazy lady two seats over from me annoyed.

“Did you ask her that because she’s female or because she’s asian?”

Silence.

“I asked her that because she didn’t seem to want the shot glass.”

Anyway…

After a long lunch I checked out Simple Nomad’s crypto chat. A lot of slide-reading, but the content was excellent, if somewhat tinfoil. I expected no less.

While looking back, I really enjoyed these talks, I was bummed overall and pining for previous years. I was with a large group and there was always someone to skip an hour with, so I didn’t force myself to sit through any less interesting titled presentations. My loss, I’m sure. Every time I was in heading to skip a talk and get a beer it seemed like Shmoo guys were doing the same. Laurels?

Sunday

I missed the E-discovery talk that I wanted to see Sunday morning for the only Windows Vista focused talk; Dan Griffin’s Hacking Windows Vista Security. Too many infosec folks stand behind Unix superiority like it is 1999 still (myself included) while Microsoft has really gotten their act together. When I found myself arguing bash over Powershell a few months back having only been exposed to a Monad Ars Technica article I realized I had my head in the sand about Vista. Dan’s talk was great and I would have loved more like it! What is Server 2008 bringing that I can’t do now? What is Vista and Powershell bringing to forensics? Pwning? Nobody at ShmooCon was talking about it.

Atlas’s Vtrace talk was over my head but I mostly stuck it out. I didn’t have to keep up with the debugging techniques to keep up with the vulnerability research implications!

I went to RenderMan‘s talk before the closing and he enumerated the how each of us are vulnerable every day because of our RFID, bluetooth, 802.11, and IR wireless devices. The talk was a nice overview but pretty snarky. A generic salesman isn’t an idiot for leaving his bluetooth and 802.11 on and killing his own batteries when the vendors make that the default or easy path. Hackers blaming the victim again?

Toby Kohlenberg, after years of being the annoying pedant, had great timing at the closing panel discussion. After 20 minutes of Bruce Potter, Simple Nomad, Johnny Long, Rick Dakan, and one mystery person (the website isn’t updated yet) rapping about what the word Hacker means, I was starting to feel like we were in my sophomore Art classes having the “What Is Art?” talk. The closing thoughts were a plea to all of us to do good with our infosec skills, in some way. On our way home, Ben and I talked about this as a diversion to me complaining about the con (and to help stay awake!). More later when we think of anything to actually do.

Now I just need to go submit all this feedback to the Shmoo folks. I agree with Ben’s submitted feeback. 2006 was my favorite ShmooCon. It isn’t fair to complain and not submit feedback!