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First-Ever Photo Tour of Defcon's Network Center
Kugrian writes "With over 9,000 hackers, freaks, feds, and geeks attending Defcon 16, the temporary wireless network setup there is considered the most hostile on the planet. Run by a dedicated group of volunteers known as Goons, the basement Defcon Network Operations Center is secured by means of a chain-link fence and armed guard. The 20-megabit connection, which is twice as fast as Defcon 15, runs over a point-to-point wireless link to another hotel that has point-of-presence in their basement. Wired's Threat Level blog managed to secure the first ever photo tour of the Center showing Goons, hardware and sniffer dogs." Reader TXISDude, who was at Defcon, doubts that attendance was as high as 9,000. Update: 08/13 18:14 GMT by T : Dave Bullock, the Wired photographer who shot these pictures, backs up that figure, though: "I interviewed Joe Grand, the badge designer a few weeks before the con. They ordered 8,600 total badges. They ran out of badges. There were hundreds of people with paper badges."
I only just got back from defcon 16, and already I missed 20?
Wow... Someone has a serious lack of Imagination. Here is what is special about this:
These guys manage the most actively hostile network on the planet. Just bringing your laptop/cell phone/PDA within wireless range of this event is asking for trouble. These are the people that put your username/password up on a giant wall of sheep if you choose to use an unencrypted connection for e-mail/web browsing.
Have you considered the challenges of maintaining a server in this environment? You are one giant target for the world's largest collection of black/grey/red-hats in the world. Let's just say that there would be a substantial amount of "iStreet-cred" if you were to 0wn the firewall.
Now, if you read the article, they describe how they setup their wireless network. They keep things very simple and maintain centralized configurations. If you are setting up a network in a potentially hostile environment, their model is a good one to follow. Why? Here are a few reasons:
Think your network can handle that? Let's take a look at one of the interesting ones - the Rogue AP's.
The people that run defcon (and many of the attendees) eat these attacks for lunch. These people triangulate wireless signals within a high-em noise environment with enough multipath to give K-9 a headache. They manage to actively seek and destroy rogue AP's (not to mention the ARP spoofing!) while maintaining a healthy network. You don't think that's special!?
Now, what about hardware reliability? Heck, if I had a choice between two pieces of gear and one of them had a "Survived DefCon 2008" sticker on it, I could tell you what I would be picking up. They had a nice Cisco fiber switch (no real surprise) but I have never heard of the Aruba AP's before. I know I'll at least check them out now. Do you not think that exposing battle-proven hardware to electronics-consuming people is special?
Look at the software too. BSD & pf. No real surprise there either. When you want ungodly-stable network filtering - that is the way to go. Don't take my word for it. Heck, don't take BSD's word for it. The setup survived the hacker Olympics with no downtime. THAT is what is special about it.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Try going to Europe. Last time I went to the CCC Congress in Berlin the uplink was 600 mbit. They usually put up signs on the second deay stating "use more bandwidth."
Usually crappy US show network. Go over to Europe where they know how to put on a show. Very few rules and even those are flexible.
Oh, and the number of machines stolen over the past 23 years can be counted on one hand.
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/attachments/652-slides_network_review.pdf
It's not the size of your stack that matters, it's how you push and pop
"Over 9000" is a joke/meme, Timothy. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=over+9000 http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Over_9000
on the other hand, any black hat worth his salt would have little trouble taking on a different identity and blending in with the white hats, if he/she's too curious to stay away.
It's expected. About the only thing anyone's ever gotten in trouble for (specific to the Network) is for stealing equipment (hence the guard, and the dog :)
So, which side of the firewall is the "untrusted" side at defcon? Do they protect defcon from the internet, or do they protect the internet from DefCon?
We do a bit of both, actually.
It's part of the Aruba management software suite.