Tech Keynote: "Making the most of your Hard(ware) work"

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Presented at BSidesCanberra 2018 by

Joe FitzPatrick

It's true. Hardware is hard, and the cards are stacked against it. Longer dev cycles, fewer iterations, tangible costs and nonzero risk of bricking stuff makes software look warm and fuzzy by comparison. On the flip side, a little bit of hardware goes a long way. Due to ignorance or laziness, it often catches the blind eye, which makes for some surprisingly vulnerable entry points to a system. I'll start by showing off a few simple tricks (including a couple new ones) that depend on electrical, logical, and physical access to a system that might seem trivia, insignificant, or out of scope - but then we'll take a look at several scenarios where we could chain those tricks and escalate to full-blown system pwnage. I'll then pick apart each scenario to see what we can learn from a strategy perspective - how we make the most of a little hardware know-how, and how we can leverage simple hardware solutions to hard software problems - as well as how we can measurably harden a system against basic hardware attacks with just a little effort. Hopefully you'll come away realizing that hardware isn't always as hard as it seems, so both attacking with and defending against it are not only feasible, but essential.