The registration for t2’15 is now closed and all available tickets have been sold.
Yes – just like last year, we’re out of seats a month before the event. The only remaining ticket is the one awarded for the most elegant challenge write-up. It’s literally the last chance if you don’t have a ticket by now!
A big thank you to all registered attendees and speakers – you are making this happen. See you next month in Helsinki!
Some of us are young/old enough to have spent too much time browsing through Cryptome archives in the late 90s and being amazed by documents about ECHELON and TEMPEST. Yet, it only took a couple of decades to see those unravel before our very eyes.
Compared to many other security topics, open source information available on electromagnetic intelligence cannot be described as extensive nor comprehensive. Luckily, the talented researchers from Tel Aviv took public research to a new level by demonstrating their 300 USD pita bread.
The setup brings practical attacks to class rooms and coffee shops near you. This time paper and pencil are recommended for taking notes.
Last year’s crowdsourcing effort was a definite success and that inspired us to go for a crowdsourced cryptanalysis mission.
Background
After last year’s t2 we spent the cold winter months browsing through online auctions for historical data processing equipment. Just like LinkedIn profiles revealing sensitive projects and inside information, old devices and mass storage units can be a treasure trove for the lucky.
The mystery box we received in the mail is suspected to be a part of secure communication infrastructure between nation states. After hard work and tedious efforts, we managed to extract an executable from the device for analysis.
Details
The first person to recover all content will win a free ticket to t2’15 conference. In addition to this, the creators of the Challenge will select another winner among the next ten correct answers. The criteria for the other selection is the elegance of the answer. In short, you can win with both speed and style.
The Challenge will be released on 2015-09-19 10:00 EEST right here at t2.fi
So many CFP entries, so little time. The schedule for 2015 is ready
and finalized, and as always, we’re pretty excited! There’s a mix of
high level and low level, offense and defense, cocktails and
networking. ..and by the way, our keynote speaker is @headhntr.
This year we’re continuing the tradition of not having dedicated
tracks – therefore Thursday’s string of OPSEC presentations is just a glitch in the random number generator. The same glitch also caused Alexander Bolshev and Boris Ryutin to receive two one hour slots for their exploit development workshop. AVR microcontrollers have never been this interesting!
As anybody who’s been to security conferences during the last decade knows, it takes something special to have a solid fuzzing presentation – Nils‘ “Windows kernel fuzzing” definitely
hits the mark. Speaking of awesomeness previously available only with nation state budgets, the guys from Tel Aviv university are
demonstrating what EMSEC means in practice. You probably want to take notes with pencil and paper this time.
The hard limit of 99 attendees (including the speakers and t2 staff)
is again in full effect. No exceptions, no excuses. Early registration
is definitely recommended. As always, t2’15 will take place in Radisson Blu Royal Hotel Helsinki.
Making predictions is easy when you have friends in low places. They indeed helped us secure a solid 5/5 performance for our 2015
predictions already during H1. It’s all about making your own luck –
Lady Fortune is not that random when you know what’s happening in the operational area.
To summarize what has happened during the past few months:
This brings us to the CFP – it’s still open a couple of weeks and waiting for your submissions. If you want to present your research to a technical audience, enjoy cold weather in Helsinki and/or meet hacker-minded people from all over the world, t2 is definitely your conference.
The registration will open soon after the first rounds of CFP has been accepted. Last year we sold all of the seats well before the event – if you are looking to buy 5 or more tickets, please contact us now.
Why spend your valuable conference time in the longest lines you have seen in your life, getting a sun burn or totally lost in the canals with your rental boat, being deprived of chewing gum or waking up in Nong Palai without any recollection how you got there? Helsinki offers you the safe and comfortable low-temperature alternative with a chance of first snow. Finland, the home country of many things you thought came from Japan.
This is the country where the strong demo scene culture has spawned multiple globally successful game companies, rally cross is also known as winter commute and people are sometimes so silent you wonder whether their opsec is 6/5 or if they are just mute. Silence doesn’t mean social situations have to be totally awkward – just ask if anybody wants have a drink and go to a sauna, and soon you are sitting naked in a steamy hot room beating yourself with a bath whisk. Experiencing Finland is extremely safe due to standards compliance and decent level of government regulation.
t2’15 offers you an audience with a taste for technical security presentations containing original content. This is your chance to showcase the latest research and lessons in offensive cryptography, hardware hacking, art of developing and cultivating assets, next generation cyber-APT-attribution, compromising nation states, displaying calculators, blinking leds or making games run (in several wrong places), anti-forensics, covert entry, enterprise defense tactics and techniques, censored research..or something completely different warming the hearts of seasoned con-goers.
The advisory board will be reviewing submissions until 2015-07-15 23:59:59 UTC. First come, first served. Submissions will not be returned.
Quick facts for speakers
+ presentation length 60-120 minutes, in English
+ complimentary travel and accommodation
+ decent speaker hospitality benefits
+ no marketing or product propaganda
Still not sure if this is for you? Check out the blast from the past
How to submit
Fill out the form at https://t2.fi/action/cfp
ProTip: Incomplete submissions will not be reviewed.
Unlike the on-going / upcoming cyber cold war involving nation states, image boards, corporate entities and drunk hackers, 2014 has run its course. In the private and public sector this means it’s time to start drafting those e-mails about next t2 infosec being included in the 2015 training budget. While not all our attendees are dependent on the fiscal calendar, we see fit to remind those who are. Our offensive friends can think of it as adding your backdoor into the target’s build environment.
Looking back at the past couple of years, the content has, more than once, been ahead of the times. A recent example would be the IMSI catcher hulabaloo in Norway a couple of months after @raviborgaonkar‘s and Swapnil’s t2 presentation.
Without a doubt, 2015 will give us more vulns with funny names and fancy websites, the Internet Of pwned Things, the doomsday clock getting closer to midnight and horrifying yet awesome nation state capabilities. To sum this up with an out-of-context quote from the 1950s:
“It must be obvious… that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.”
— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
ps. despite several requests to add BTC, gift cards, pieces of eight or crash triggers as payment methods, we’re still sticking to the credit card payments. Getting those prepaid cards is not that hard really. On a final note, invoices have been marked as obsolete and our next release might not support them.
Year after year we hear stories about people who annually almost attend t2. The intention is always there, but when the time comes to register for the event, they find themselves in the middle of a floppy disk inventory or some other significant crisis at (work|home|garden).
The question for many of these people then remains – was it any good, should I attend next year? The advisory board is certainly too biased to answer this question; we are like winemakers who think each year qualifies as a vintage. The regulars and other long-time conference goers gladly reminisce past events, while wearing some obscure and highly collectible t-shirt from ’04. In our view, a first time speaker’s opinion is probably a good objective yardstick.
Patrick Wardle, flying half-way across the globe to deliver two talks in the cold and snowy Helsinki, was kind enough to share his experiences in this Synack lab’s blog post. For other t2 coverage, see #t2infosec on Twitter
Due to recent extraordinary events, we’re diverting from our usual Challenge process this year. Instead of a traditional puzzle, a captured binary will be released for crowdsourced reverse-engineering.
Background
Running assets is always difficult, however this year has been excruciating for t2 infosec. We lost one of our most prized and well placed deep cover operatives in a foreign three letter agency. Shortly after the CFP, communications stopped and we have to assume her new assignment is a permanent placement at a black site somewhere in Eastern Europe.
Luckily for us, the person was able to exfiltrate a key piece of an intelligence analysis system before disappearing. In order to turn the tables and go for the pride-and-ego down, our intention is to burn this capability once and for all.
Y-LOCKPOINT is designed for searching and analyzing compromised computer systems. Despite the OPSEC failures, which allowed us to gain access to front-end application, the binary is well-protected – preliminary analysis indicates emphasis on multi-layer protection and resistance to analysis.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to participate in the crowdsourced reverse engineering effort of the acquired front-end binary.
Details
The first person to recover all content will win a free ticket to t2’14 conference. In addition to this, the creators of the Challenge will select another winner among the next ten correct answers. The criteria for the other selection is the elegance of the answer. In short, you can win with both speed and style.
The Challenge will be released on 2014-09-13 10:00 EEST right here at t2.fi
Do you feel like Las Vegas is too hot, Berlin too bohème, Miami too humid, Singapore too clean and Pattaya just totally confusing ? No worries! Helsinki will be the perfect match for you – guaranteed low temperature, high tech and just enough regulation to make everything appear to be under control. This is the country where indestructible mobile phone and Linux kernel were invented.
Helsinki, the capital of Finland, known for the Finnish design and casual-yet-almost-sophisticated drinking culture offers you the chance to familiarize yourself with the birth place of many popular PC, console and mobile games. The murder rate of only 2.2 per 100 000 people makes Finland one of the safest countries for delivering a presentation. Do polar bears roam free in Helsinki? How do you go from being silent in three languages to having incoherent discussions in all of them? What does 176% mobile penetration look like? Come and see for yourself!
t2’14 is looking for technical infosec presentations with original content. Whether it’s your complicated relationship with the APT, embedded device exploitation, tactics and operational procedures in high stress / high risk operations, implementing or avoiding global surveillance, latest advances in offensive/defensive applications of computer science, the gospel of weird machine, breaking the Internet, reverse engineering milware or something totally different, we’d like to hear about it.
The advisory board will be reviewing submissions until 2014-07-04. First come, first served. No returns, no refunds.
Quick facts for speakers
+ presentation length 60-120 minutes, in English
+ complimentary travel and accommodation
+ decent speaker hospitality benefits
+ no marketing or product propaganda
A blast from the past:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:t2.fi%20intitle:%22schedule%20for%22
How to submit
Please include the following with your submission (incomplete submissions will not be accepted):
Please send the above information to cfp-2014 (at) lists.t2.fi