“Hacktivity is the biggest event of its kind in Central & Eastern Europe. About 1000 visitors are coming from all around the globe every year to learn more about the latest trends of cybersecurity, get inspired by people with similar interest and develop themselves via comprehensive workshops and training sessions”.

Since many years, this hacker conference is a stable point in the year for me as a visitor, or sometimes as a presenter. This year was special, because instead of presenting and giving a talk I decided to go there with a training.

Hardware hacking is a topic that is for some reason not that much addressed in our region by professionals. As this is both a hobby and a profession for me, I was happy to provide the Reverse Engineering & Hacking Hardware training to people who wanted to step into this area.

It was a fully booked course with a great success. I had an awesome team of participants and we spent three days together on mostly hands-on focused hardware hacking exercises.

For those who are interested in the details, here are some keywords: power glitching, timing attack, JTAG, SWD, I2C, UART, SPI, Flash, EEPROM, eMMC, logic analyzer, multimeter, oscilloscope, PCB, schematics; and the high level agenda below:

• Reconnaissance
• Signal measuring / analysis, tools and techniques
• Generic communication interfaces and buses (analysis, manipulation, attack)
• Identifying and using debug interfaces (debugging, coding, firmware extraction)
• Interfacing and manipulating external memory chips (extraction, manipulation, attack)
• Basic side channel and fault injection attacks
• Typical issues and pitfalls in HW security
• Using combination of SW/HW tools to attack hardware
• Hardware hacking challenges for different topics

Here are some great pictures from the training moments, captured by the event’s official professional photographer.

It was an intensive but fantastic three days and right after the training we could enjoy the Hacktivity conference for another two days. I was also there with our company booth with a car hacking and hardware hacking demo environment. We were the proud sponsors of the Hacktivity2019 conference badge, but that is another story 🙂