Peter Stuge

The walls of CCC Berlin are filled with posters, analog as well as digital art, and also: a large LED display! The display is a proper piece of dual-use technology, serving both as hack material for fun and as a useful tool e.g. for taking notes during meetings.

Come join us on a technology tour through the history of this fun piece of kit, starting with a look at the original hardware and software architecture and moving on through the many following software, hardware and mechanical hack generations in and around the display. The display has come quite far. Originally one could watch individual characters render on the 71680 LEDs, now 35 fps video playback is effortless, and it functions as a hub for collaborative visual expression using both text and graphics. Key words: 6502, CSS, Ethernet, ATXMEGA, JavaScript, Cortex-M3, WebSockets, AM335x, BeagleBone Black, PRU, Etherpad, CNC machining, Aluminium Welding

Other people: mrflix

This Foundations talk explains the systems and protocols that make up the Internet, starting from a laptop with a Wi-Fi connection. No particular technical knowledge required.

Many consider "the Internet" a utility similar to electricity - and that's a great attitude! - but for most, "the Internet" only means access to a few centralized services offered by mega-corporations "for free", around which people build their entire social and professional lives. Come along for a look behind the scenes of all those fancy websites, let's go through what the Internet actually is! Knowing the difference between the network and services reachable through the network is perhaps more important than ever, because if we implicitly give service providers all the power by never asking for a public, utility-like network then that's the end of the Internet as we know it. Key word: Net neutrality. So in this talk we will discover the network. In simple terms and without too much technical detail we'll start out with the "atom" of networks the packet, then cover the fundamental Internet Protocol (IPv4-only for simplicity), we'll try to answer what is a network? - not obvious it turns out, we'll look at where do IP addresses come from? and then we'll move on to the Internet cornerstone that is routing. We'll approach routing from the perhaps most well-known router - the wireless home router - and then look at how similar or dissimilar routers on the Internet are to that home router, leading us to a look at the routing protocol which constantly determines how our packets flow throughout the world. Those are the basic building blocks of the Internet. Now for some delicious alphabet soup! We'll take a step toward applications and compare UDP, TCP and SCTP, which are all used together with IP for most if not all end-user Internet communication. Finally, we'll arrive at the most common applications, looking into how DNS (domain names), SMTP (sending email) and HTTP (web) work. All of this is actually surprisingly simple and surprisingly old. None of it was built to be secure. The goal is that you will gain an understanding of the structure of the Internet, that you will be able "see through" the browser, email client and web service facades, because now you know what's going on behind the scenes, and everything that's actually possible with a public utility network - far more than centralized consumption/you-are-our-product services.

In 2010 I was asked by the second maintainer in a row to take over as new maintainer of the libusb project. The first time I had declined. The second time I accepted, and sadly failed. Eventually a hostile fork emerged, with the explicit goal to take over the original project. I will tell you my story, which mistakes I made and what I learned - about independent and corporate contributors in open source projects, about package maintainers in downstream OS distributions, about trolls on the internet, about GitHub Inc. and about myself. The hostile fork? It wasn't merged.

Panel discussion on PCB design tools.

Other people: Kaspar Emanuel Wayne Stambaugh Peter Clifton Tomasz Wlostowski

Each EDA tool currently has its own parts library, even(!) the open source EDA packages. This lack of reuse is not very efficient, and certainly not state-of-the-art when compared to the collaboration and cooperation taking place in the source code.

Let's fix that - I would like to start the edacore project with the aim to fulfill the part library needs of not only open source EDA packages, but ideally all of the industry. Sounds ambitious? You bet. Maybe it'll actually work out in the end.

The purpose of this event is to quickly introduce the fairly simple project idea and then to gather collaborators who care about creating a universal parts library, flexible enough to work for almost every use case, and finally to do a bit of brainstorming around what the edacore data model must take into account.

At least one representative with a major semiconductor vendor has already expressed interest in populating edacore using their in-house data. I imagine that other vendors would also be interested. Anything that helps sell chips is good, and perhaps we can have dialogue such that providing information will be very easy for as many vendors as possible.

The project might turn out a total flop, but we will not know unless we try...

Other people: kay florolf Sebastian *m Andi

A commodity laptop is analyzed to identify exposed attack surfaces and is then secured on both the hardware and the firmware level against permanent modifications by malicious software as well as quick drive-by hardware attacks by evil maids, ensuring that the machine always powers up to a known good state and significantly raising the bar for an attacker who wants to use the machine against its owner.

Commodity computers by design include attack vectors that allow malicious software and attackers who gain brief physical access, so-called evil maids, to take full control over the machine without the owner ever noticing. The presentation briefly enumerates well-known attacks such as remote DMA over IEEE1349/FireWire, BIOS bootkits, AMT and closed source operating system updates to arrive at a problem statement, and moves on in search of solutions which can block the attacks completely or at least hinder them from becoming persistent, starting a layer below them all; with the schematic of a laptop mainboard. A few relatively simple hardware modifications are identified, which together with the coreboot #goodBIOS firmware prevent two entire classes of attacks. The result is a machine which always powers up in a known good state and which must be under attacker control for 20 minutes in order to be compromised, rather than just 20 seconds. In closing the presentation starts a discussion about what we can do to address this problem, which exists in every single computer on the market, on a larger scale.