What’s Good and What’s Bullshit at DefCon 13

This is more for my scheduling purposes than anything else, but I thought I’d share. Given that my friends and I will be busy with Capture The Flag at this year’s DefCon (just mere weeks away!) I won’t have a lot of time to see talks. I played in CTF last year and didn’t see a single talk; given that I’m helping to run the contest this year I don’t have high hopes for my free time.

If I get a spare minute this is what I’ll be seeing, what I’ll be avoiding, and what I’ll be divided on, culled from the DefCon 13 Speakers Page:

Good

appropriate to the conference, covers new material, challenges the audience

• Routing in the Dark: Scalable Searches in Dark P2P Networks


• The Information Security Industry: $3 Billion of Snake Oil (editor’s note: you had me at the title)


• The Next Generation of Cryptanalytic Hardware


• Google Hacking for Penetration Testers (editor’s note: seems like a mundane topic but the speaker is a sharp fella)


• Suicidal Linux (editor’s note: Bruce does a good rant)


• Pen-testing the Backbone

Bullshit

tired topics, conference-unspecific material, non-technical, pandering, goofy, “hacker sociology” horseshit, tedious libertarianism, too academic, too corporate

• A New Hybrid Approach for Infrastructure Discovery


• On the Current State of Remote Active OS Fingerprinting


• Introducing the Bastille Hardening Assessment Tool


• Development of An Undergraduate Security Program


• Be Your Own Telephone Company…With Asterisk


• Analysis of Identity Creation Detection Schemes post-9/11 (editor’s note: bonus bullshit for use of the phrase “post-9/11)


• Countering Denial of Information Attacks


• CISO Q&A with Dark Tangent


• Whiz Kids or Juvenile Delinquents: A Sociological Perspective The Construction of Hacker Identity


• Introduction to Lockpicking and Physical Security


• The Hacker’s Guide to Search and Arrest


• The Power to Map: How Cyberspace Is Imagined Through Cartography


• Hacking Nmap


• A Safecracking Double Feature: Dial ‘B’ For BackDialing and Spike the Wonder Safe


• Bacon: A Framework for Auditing and Penetration Testing


• Inequality and Risk (editor’s note: please stop talking, Paul Graham)


• Top Ten Legal Issues in Computer Security


• The Insecure Workstation II: “bob reloaded”


• Your Defense is Offensive


• No Women Allowed? Exploring Gender Differences In Hacking


• Meme Mining for Fun and Profit


• Credit Cards: Everything You have Ever Wanted to Know


• Black Ops 2005


• Passive Host Auditing


• Doing Not-For-Profit Tech: The Hacker Foundation Year in Review


• A Linguistic Platform for Threat Development


• Introducing Unicornscan – Riding the Unicorn


• The Dark Side of Winsock


• Social Engineering Do’s & Don’ts (A Female Perspective)


• The Six Year Old Hacker: No More Script Kiddies


• Old Skewl Hacking – InfraRed


• Visual Security Event Analysis


• Meet the Fed


• Hacking the Mind (Influence and NLP)


• Ask EFF: The Year in Digital Liberties


• Causing the Law


• Bypassing Authenticated Wireless Networks


• Assymetric Digital Warfare


• Licensing Agreements 101: The Creative Commons License


• Hacking Windows CE


• Why Tech Documentaries are Impossible (And why we have to do them anyway.)


• Automation – Deus ex Machina or Rube Goldberg Machine?


• Forensic Data Acquisition Tools


• Building WarDriving Hardware Workshop


• Legal and Ethical Aspects of WarDriving


• The NMRC Warez 2005 Extravaganza


• Attacking Web Services: The Next Generation of Vulnerable Apps


• Hacking Google AdWords


• The Revolution Will Not Be Copyrighted: Why You Should Care About Free Culture


• Recapturing the Revolutionary Heart of Hacking


• Hackers and the Media- Misconceptions and Critical Tools To Combat Them


• Paul Vixie Speaks


• Trends in Licensing of Security Tools


• Attacking Biometric Access Control Systems


• The Unveiling of My Next Big Project

Could Go Either Way

might be good, might be bullshit

• Mosquito – Secure Remote Code Execution Framework


• Auto-adapting Stealth Communication Channels


• Sketchtools: Prototyping Physical Interfaces (editor’s note: this looks neat but is totally inappropriate for DefCon, which is the fault of the speaker reviewers and not this presenter)


• Hacking in a Foreign Language: A Network Security Guide to Russia (and Beyond)


• Intro to High Security Locks and Safes


• Surgical Recovery from Kernel-Level Rootkit Installations


• GeoIP Blocking, A Controversial But (Sometimes) Effective Approach


• Trust Transience: Post Intrusion SSH Hijacking


• ATM Network Vulnerabilities


• Shmoo-Fu: Hacker Goo, Goofs, and Gear with the Shmoo


• “Shadow Walkerâ€? â€â€? Raising The Bar For Rootkit Detection


• DIRA: Automatic Detection, Identification, and Repair of Control-Hijacking Attacks


• Physical Security Bypass Techniques: Exploring the Ethics of Full Disclosure


• End-to-End Voice Encryption over GSM: A Different Approach