Keynote Speaker: A day in the life of a hacker

Security workshop / 3rd COLARIS

Monday — October 15th, 2007 14:30

In this session I will give a roundup of some the issues I've spoken about over the last year, which include: Mag stripes,Infra Red, RF ID, ATM Machines. Whilst I aim to make this reasonably technical, it will be fairly relaxed and informal, with live demonstrations and some room for experimentation if any of the participants are brave enough...

Presenters

• Adam Laurie (RFIDIOt, GB)

  Adam Laurie is a Director of The Bunker Secure Hosting Ltd. He started in the computer industry in the late Seventies, working as a computer programmer on PDP8 and other mini computers, and then on various Unix, Dos and CP/M based micro computers as they emerged in the Eighties. He quickly became interested in the underlying network and data protocols, and moved his attention to those areas and away from programming, starting a data conversion company which rapidly grew to become Europe's largest specialist in that field (A.L. downloading Services). During this period, he successfully disproved the industry lie that music CDs could not be read by computers, and, with help from his brother Ben, wrote the world's first CD ripper, 'CDGRAB'. At this point, he and Ben became interested in the newly emerging concept of 'The Internet', and were involved in various early open source projects, the most well known of which is probably their own -ApacheSSL - which went on to become the defacto standard secure web server. Since the late Nineties they have focused their attention on security, and have been the authors of various papers exposing flaws in Internet services and/or software, as well as pioneering the concept of reusing military data centres (housed in underground nuclear bunkers) as secure hosting facilities. Adam has been a senior member of staff at DEFCON (http://www.defcon.org) since 1997, and also acted as a member of staff during the early years of the Black Hat Briefings, where he is now a regular training instructor (http://www.blackhat.com), and he is also a member of the Bluetooth SIG Security Experts Group (http://www.bluetooth.org). His current focus is on RFID, and he has recently published an opensource RFID software library, written in Python, which can be found at http://rfidiot.org.