.aware goes CCCLast year, the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) held its annual Chaos Communication Congress under the motto "Full Steam Ahead" in Berlin, Germany. From the 27th to the 30th of December, nerds from all over the country gathered around and inside the Berlin Congress Center to attend the talks and workshops at one of the biggest community events in Germany. And on a blistering cold 26th of December, we prepared for our very own departure to the country's capitol, with the fierce intention to finish The Secret of Monkey Island in just 4 days already filled with plenty of m4d h4x.
And the one in the middle, the one with the black hat, sucking on that bottle of coke like it's David Hasselhoff's weener, that's me. But, with no further ado, here is my journal of our trip to Berlin. .day 0
We decided to have breakfast at the burgerking around the corner, which would prove to be the most healthy food we were going to get on this trip. After that, it was strictly 604 kilometers by car. I shan't, I can't and I won't reproduce our chats during the trip, but they weren't of particularly technical nature anyway. Against all odds, we even had music in born's car, which is sortof remarkable: The car does not posess any device such as a radio. However, we were able to attach a pair of kinky CreativeLabs™ speakers to born's mobile phone, which was loaded with some security backups of our favourite music albums. 21st century ftw!
Side Note:The fact that we had to pay like 12 Euros for the batteries at some gas station was silently ommitted. Unfortunately, during the 7 hour trip, I realized that I had probably cought a cold, and towards the evening, I felt rather ill. I decided to ignore it, which was probably the only thing I could do anyway. When we arrived at the congress center, there was a huge queue in front of the ticket counter - but thanks to the heavens above, I could walk right past it to get my press ticket and 2 visitor tickets for born and toby. Having saved approximately 2 hours of standing in line, we went to see Aliens vs. Predator 2 instead. It's the shit. .day 1
12:45 We went to sit the talk on the "Bundestrojaner" (roughly translates to "national trojan"), which was in German. The name is a joke on proposed laws in Germany which basically legalize the electronic surveillance of any suspect without his or her knowledge. This includes, but is not limited to the following techniques:
14:00 There was supposed to be a talk on "distributed security", which sounded pretty theoretical - but I wasn't any less disappointed to learn that the talk had been canceled. We decided to go and get some food in order to return for the talk about sidechannel attacks on AES at 1715. Next to the congress hall, there was a shopping center which also contained a couple of fast food restaurants - we quickly agreed on the chinese one. Born took the really tastey meatballs for 5 bucks, but toby and me thought that some grilled noodles for only 3 would cut it. We were wrong. What I imagined to be a huge bowl of yummy noodles with grilled chicken turned out to be a miserably tiny paper box the size of a rubix cube - stuffed with some lukewarm noodlegoo. Frustration level - elevated. 17:15 And so we returned, hungry. And the AES talk was canceled. And I was not happy. The only two talks that had really interested me did not happen at all. I wanted to make the best of it anyway and checked out the workshops downstairs.
I ended up doing neither the lego nor the lockpicking thing, but it was fun to watch anyway. In case you are wondering - when questioned, the people at these tables did not allow me to take any pictures of them. Hence, no pics of cool lego hackers available. I got the same reaction from most people at the congress, which I rate somewhere between sad and ludicrous.
20:30 CyberCrime 2.0! This talk could finally convince me that it had been a good idea to come all the way to Berlin. It was a really interesting Analysis of the networking mechanisms and protocols used by the Storm Worm. Thorsten Holz did a great job at presenting some very interesting results - without giving the audience too much of a headache. Great job! I would have loved to hear more about the kernelmode rootkit component of the Worm, but that was definitely outside the scope of this talk, so I am not complaining. Afterwards, I would have loved to stay for the VX talk at 23:00, but I felt so exhausted and ill that we had to head home. .day 2As you might have guessed, all three of us study mathematics. Hence, we wanted to go and check out the "Absurd Mathematics" talk at 12:45, but it was so crowded that we decided to camp somewhere and get our shit together instead. We were told later by a trustworthy source that it wasn't quite so mathematical, so I suppose it was not that much of a loss either.
14:00 Time for
Quantum Cryptography and Possible Attacks! Although I have a firm
interest in cryptography, it is motivated exclusively by mathematical fascination.
Hence, I was never really into quantum cryptography, which is research done by
physicists. Also,
the last talk on the subject which I attended had been quite theoretical.
Back then, it sounded like there was, theoretically, a way to securely transport,
one bit of information, every couple of seconds, across a distance of roughly one
meter, under laboratory conditions. As you can imagine, I wasn't really impressed
back then.
However, either I got the entirely wrong impression or a lot of progress has been made.
17:15 This one was a talk about breaking just in time compilers, in this case, some java VM. It was a good talk and a solid exploit - but then again, this kind of stuff is always the same. Someone wasn't paying attention to security issues when imeplementing a certain piece of software - in this case, a virtual machine - then someone comes along and does the h4x. Hence, I really can't remember any technical details, no matter how much I try.
Yea, that's a remote-controlled tank. There is absolutely no fucking need to grow up. Ever. 18:30 A talk about automatic memory management. Actually, I would not have attended if it hadn't been for the others (and the fact that the parallel talks were even less interesting). Anyway, from the few moments when I was really paying attention I could definitely tell that it was exactly how I expected it to be. We would listen to a lot of possible ways to garbage-collect and why this is so much better than coding in C. Phony crap. 20:30 and it was time for the absolute highlight of the day,
and maybe the entire congress itself, to begin. I had so very been looking for the
phenoelit talks, and my hopes would even be
surpassed.
The first talk was a hilarious compilation of crazy barcode hacks, ranging from video
rental services over postal codes to cross site scripting attacks on hardcopy newspapers
(check those slides and see for yourself). I got the impression that FX did some really
thorough research on the topic and hence, the talk was very rich. He knew those
barcodes inside out, and you could tell that it came from experience.
Both talker and audience, I believe, had an incredible amount of fun - there were
significantly more laughs and shouts than usually, and I still can't refrain from
smirking devilishly when I think of certain episodes. Consequently, the single hour
went by too quickly - but luckily, there was a second lecture waiting! Afterwards, we also went to sit another talk on RFID chips and it was good, but I was used up for the day and unable to focus. It was a great day, and I had seen a lot of cool new things, and it was time to go home and sleep. .day 3
17:15 Time for our first talk. From Ring Zero to UID Zero suffered from a really frustrating problem: The topic was interesting, I was really curious about it - but the speakers had such strong accents that I was unable to follow the talk. On the one hand that's quite sad because these guys seemed to know their shit, and it would have probably been very interesting if it hadn't been for the language difficulties - on the other hand, though: I am really glad that this was the only time I had this sort of problem. The majority of other talks that we attended were in English as well, and I didn't have too many problems with the pronounciation.
"Dare to be free, stop the surveillance madness"
20:30 Reverse Engineering of Embedded Devices was easy on the eyes and the ears, but that also means that I did not learn anything new here. I lost count to how many builtin telnet clients of routers, cable modems or coffee machines I already connected in my life - We all have toyed and tempered around with hardware devices, and he simply didn't talk about anything I had not done before. In the evening, we went to check the cbase, a club / bar / meeting place for computer geeks and their computers. We didn't really stay till late at night because I was still having a sore throat and toby had caught my cold in the meanwhile, but I can imagine that you can have some kickass parties in this place. There were two huge screens where funky acid phantasy graphics and movies were being displayed, comfy sofas and, of course, a bar. I made some pictures so you get an idea:
.conclusionIt was a great trip to Berlin, and I saw quite a lot of very interesting and new stuff. It was an event well worth the long journey. Particularly the talks by Phenoelit made for a totally awesome second day, but that's probably a matter of personal taste. Talk about taste - what I really liked about the congress was the diversity. Every hour, there were three parallel talks. 24C3 always had something to offer for everyone. I found that particularly well-done; all we geeks ever want is infotainment, after all. rattle out. |
Actually,
born is the kind of guy who has a certain habit of being late, and when toby arrived
at my place, we both had already received the text message that the departure would
be delayed by an hour or such - so we fired up our laptops and got Monkey Island running
on his box and 
