Chaos Computer Club - recent events feed

Serendiep is a 42m inland cargo barge with a theatre, a fablab and an art/science labyrinth on board. It's being converted to electric propulsion using second hand EV parts and hardware from openinverter. The ultimate goal is to harvest all the energy needed from solar panels mounted on the hatches covering the cargo hold. Sailing is among the most efficient modes of cargo transport. Yet in the mu...

Everybody talks about cryptography, but only a few understand what it means. This interactive session will explain the very basics of cryptography and will leave the attendants with more confidence why to use cryptography. Many talks mentioned cryptography somewhere along the presentation and everybody just nods. But how many people actually know the insights of cryptography? Why some things work...

An insight and analysis of the events leading up to and during the fight to preserve XS4ALL in 2019, as well as exploring the underlying issues that ultimately lead to its demise. In 2019 it was announced that XS4ALL as a brand and company would be integrated into KPN. What followed was a stormy year of customers rising up, employees resisting and frequent media coverage culminating in a court cas...

RFID reverse engineering has seen significant advancements, yet a comprehensive overview of the field remains scattered across research and practitioner communities. Here the authors presents a structured survey of existing RFID technologies, encryption protocols, and known attack methodologies. Take the opportunity to listen to both Kirils' practical experiences and the deep insights of Iceman wh...

ZenDiS, the Zentrum Digitale Souveränität in Germany, is at the forefront of loosening the grip the US tech industry (and, via the CLOUD act, the US government) has over the European governments by providing open source solutions for the public sector. Do we do it alone? No! The french and the dutch governments are also onboard and we welcome more countries into our fold! An overview over the ZenD...

RAdio-frequency Detection And Ranging (RADAR) aims at using electromagnetic signals for detecting target location and motion. We demonstrate in this talk various RADAR architectures using dual-channel coherent Software Defined Radio (SDR) receivers and the associated signal processing techniques relying heavily on cross-correlations. Embedded systems are tackled, with a Raspberry Pi providing enou...

When embedded into JavaScript, WebAssembly modules can be "sandboxed" by defining a limited set of _imports_. It turns out that an obscure "feature" allows us to craft an exploit which bypasses this barrier, enabling us to run arbitrary JavaScript code (pop an alert) from within a malicious WASM module. All within spec... by accident? (Also released as write-up in Phrack #72) When talking about We...

Fuzzing is one of the most effective ways to find elusive software vulnerabilities. Despite years of research, general purpose fuzzers such as AFL++ and Libfuzzer struggle to mutate complex data structures effectively, preventing them from exploring deep functionality. Grammar fuzzing, an alternative fuzzing strategy is much more effective but complex to setup and run. Autarkie abstracts away all...

The need for digital sovereignty has always been great, but now there is an autocrat in the White house that is fighting everything he deems “Woke”. This renders USA Big Tech that is run by billionaires that have sworn loyalty to this new King unsuitable for use in education. In this presentation we'll present the WHY for the FOSS stack for schools, our plan how to get there, and the progress we h...

I want to talk about how we are setting the standards for our digital world and society. Now that our whole world and everything in it seems to have become a business case for for-profit digitalisation, we are purposefully driven to use off the shelve, inflexible, data-absorbing and exploitative products marketed to us by big companies. Can standards help change that? And how do we do that? Here a...

We use it every day, but how does it really work? USB has been around for almost 30 years and it evolved into really universal interface that even extended from the world of computers into the world of extra low voltage electric distribution. In this talk, I will present the basic ideas of the interface with focus on physical layer. We will cover: - how the world of computer peripherals looked lik...

This is a first introduction to quantum computers. This is a first introduction to quantum computers: no prior background needed. We will discuss how quantum mechanics, a theory of microscopic particles, contains counter-intuitive effects like superposition and entanglement. Schrödinger’s cat is an iconic example, where the poor animal is both dead and alive at the same. Interestingly, the same la...

*WHY* did I donate a kidney? *H*ow did I donate a kidney? *Y*ou might want to donate a kidney! Donating a kidney is quite a thing. But it also isn't. But mostly, it is. I will talk about all the aspects (personal, technical, logistical, ethical) of the process. Lots of related but entirely different things. How does it affect me? How long did it take? What does everything look like? What do the nu...

We present EntrySign, a cryptographic flaw in AMD’s microcode patch verification logic, including how we discovered the bug and how you can extend our results. EntrySign lets us execute arbitrary microcode on all AMD CPUs from Zen to Zen 5 and modify the behavior of x86 instructions. We will delve into the format of AMD microcode, how their patches are verified, how we were able to reverse enginee...

The WHY2025 Capture the Flag competition (CTF) has multiple lockpicking challenges as part of the CTF. Successfully picking these locks gives you one of the flags. To be able to create a solid CTF challenge out of an ordinary lock we had to come up with some kind of solution. We used our past experiences in CTFs as inspiration to see how we could do it better. This talk shows the concepts we came...

Zero Trust (ZT) is a security paradigm gaining traction and popularity. In the talk I will show how ZT is the progression of many security ideas that you may already be familiar with, and how you can rebrand and review what you are already doing to show that you are making progress. Zero Trust (ZT) is a security paradigm gaining traction, especially in the US defense community. The underlying idea...

Smart devices are deeply embedded in the physical world: they can see, hear, and control things around us, often with zero real limits. When they’re hacked, it’s not just your data on the line; it’s your safety, privacy, and environment. In this talk, I’ll share some new ideas for putting a layer of access control between these devices and the real world, so we stop giving them a blank check. Thes...

Prins S. en De Geit is one of the most exciting acts in the Dutch music scene today. This trio from The Hague — fronted by Scott Beekhuizen, with Marne Miesen on bass and Daniel Ortgiess producing — creates infectious electro-punk-pop with sharp lyrics and unrestrained energy. Their bold sound and theatrical performances have electrified festivals like Lowlands, Rock Werchter, Pinkpop, and Appelpo...

So, it is 2025 and mailservers are getting more and more replaced by cloud-based solutions, which promise to be easy and secure... But what if you can just do it yourself? Hosting your private message server and applying common modern mailserver security practices on your own? This talk wants to introduce a few common software solutions and introduce multiplie techniques from an operators toolbox....

Passkeys are a new way to log in without passwords. They solve a lot of the traditional security risks associated with passwords. But passkeys are only secure if implemented well. When implemented incorrectly, they lead to new attack vectors that hackers can exploit. In this talk, we will first study the protocol behind passkeys, called Webauthn. We will then look at some common implementation mis...

Love reverse engineering? You'd be right since you always find something interesting! In this talk we're going to study absolutely every byte of the DNA source of a real bacterium. And in doing so, we'll find bootstrapping code, genes, duplicate genes, anti-viral defense mechanisms, idiomatic/non-idiomatic/borrowed code & much more. It helps if you've also visited the companion talk on DNA, but th...

Why limit yourself to Ethernet and Wi-Fi when every wire in your house can carry packets? This talk explores alternative physical networking technologies that exist but are often overlooked. From Powerline Networking (HomePlug AV/AV2) to MoCA over coaxial cables, we’ll dive into how these systems work, their encryption and security models, known exploits, and the inherent risks of non-switched cab...

Digital money everywhere, all the time, all at once... isn't it getting a little boring? In this talk you will learn how [GNU Taler](https://taler.net/), a privacy-focused payment system, leverages the properties of digital tokens and blind signatures to enable a wide array of use cases such as discount coupons, subscriptions, and tax-deductible donation receipts; all while preserving untraceabili...

Any even remotely advanced tasks on unixoid systems will inevitably lead to an encounter with one of the systems oldest components: The shell. An ancient artefact that is in equal parts being feared, mystified, or possibly even glorified. In an effort to demystify origins, development, and current role of shells, this talk tells a tale deeply rooted in the earliest days of UNIX development. In the...

A brief retrospective over the past 16 years of organized voluntary repair initiatives and a look at the breakthroughs for the right to repair movement When Martine Postma organized her first Repair-Café in Amsterdam, would she have imagined the kind of traction that her initiative would gain worldwide? With rampant enshittification of services, but also products ("planned obsolescence") comes res...