Chaos Computer Club - archive feed

Encoding or decoding random radio-waveforms doesn't need incredible expensive hardware anymore which offers new possibilities for building up over-the-air communication systems. There are Software Defined Radios providing affordable cellular radio to remote villages, Community Radios are using SDR to build up digital radio networks and other cool stuff. Some basic knowledge what is going on in SDR...

Restricting access to knowledge and science is not beneficial for society. So why are scientific results still locked up behind paywalls? Even though the answer to this question is enlightening, the story is quickly told. Much more important is the knowledge on how to change this. Politics, research funders, libraries and scientists have to join forces and to push forward to flip scholarly communi...

In this presentation we will take a look at how to break the most popular cryptocurrency hardware wallets. We will uncover architectural, physical, hardware, software and firmware vulnerabilities we found including issues that could allow a malicious attacker to gain access to the funds of the wallet. The attacks that we perform against the hardware wallets range from breaking the proprietary boot...

After launching a spacecraft into orbit the actual work for mission control starts. Besides taking care of the position and speed of the spacecraft this includes e.g. detailed modeling of the power usage, planning of ground station contacts, payload operations and dealing with unexpected anomalies. In this talk we will see many examples of problems particular to space crafts and how they influence...

Hier geht es los. about this event: https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2018/Fahrplan/events/9985.html

We all know what FAX is, and for some strange reason most of us need to use it from time to time. Hard to believe its 2018, right? But can FAX be something more than a bureaucratic burden? Can it actually be a catastrophic security hole that may be used to compromise your entire network? Come watch our talk and find out … Unless you've been living under a rock for the past 30 years or so, you prob...

Neutrinos are “ghost-like” elementary particles that can literally go through walls. They can bring information from places that are impossible to observe through other means. This talk provides a glimpse behind the scenes of a next-generation neutrino detector called Hyper-Kamiokande – a cylindrical water tank the size of a high-rise building. I will describe some of the problems you encounter wh...

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 whic...

In this talk @zelf invites to the world of Scuttlebutt, the decentralized P2P gossiping protocol, and how it can be transformative for society through decentralization of data and enabling local community development. Scuttlebutt is a fast growing decentralized social network. As an alternative to the large corporate social networks it enables autonomy for the users and a free zone from big data h...

Technology is the solution: What is the problem? This seems to be the motto. Algorithms may be about to control our free speech while tracking technologies could control our bodies and communications. Will we react or stay quiet? Technology is the solution: What is the problem? This seems to be the motto. Whether it is about preventing the dissemination of terrorist content or to prevent copyright...

Die AfD-Bundestagsfraktion wird in der Öffentlichkeit vor allem mit ihren rassistischen Positionen wahrgenommen – mit ihren netzpolitischen Aktivitäten bleibt sie zumeist unter dem Radar. Dieser Talk zeigt, wie die AfD-Fraktion die Netzpolitik dennoch als vermeintlich neutrales Thema nutzt, um für ihre rechtsextreme Partei eine parlamentarische und gesellschaftliche Normalisierung herzustellen. Al...

Der Datenschutz ist als erst relativ frisch erkämpftes Abwehrrecht von Bürgern gegen Firmen und Staat ein wichtiges, aber häufig missverstandenes Rechtsgebiet. Zuletzt ist es durch die Grundverordnung auf europäischer Ebene in den Blick der Netzöffentlichkeit geraten. Dieser Vortrag soll einen niedrigschwelligen Einstieg in den Datenschutz geben und aus Perspektive einer Datenschützerin mit zehnjä...

How to apply Shannon's information theory to biology. Cells, from bacteria to human cells, constantly take up, store, retrieve, communicate and make decisions based on information. How they realise all this computation using very unreliable components is still largely an open question. Instead of transistors they have to employ proteins, but proteins constantly degenerate and are re-built making t...

Let's think "Beyond Slavery": Afroroutes is a one-of-a-kind VR experience conceived as a journey through 3 displaced African heritages, immersing users in Rituals and Ceremonies to experience that well-conserved memory form, but also to feel the power of Music as a strong anthropological tool. Connecting Afro-diasporic narratives: alterity and heritage transcendence within the digital era, Afrorou...

Six years ago the idea behind CensoredPlanet started, that is now launched at censoredplanet.org. We had a simple (yet essential) guiding principle: measurements that may be politically sensitive should be done without volunteer participation. In this talk, besides a detailed scientific overview of the techniques and the current state of CensoredPlanet, I plan to talk about my experience in develo...

Voicemail systems can be compromised by leveraging old weaknesses and top of current technology. The impact goes way beyond having your messages exposed. Voicemail systems have been with us since the 80s. They played a big role in the earlier hacking scene and re-reading those zines, articles and tutorials paints an interesting picture. Not much has changed. Not in the technology nor in some of th...

Recent attacks against elections in the U.S. and Europe demonstrate that nation-state attackers are becoming more aggressive, even as campaigning and voting are becoming increasingly reliant on computers. How much has changed since 2016, when the U.S. experienced unprecedented attacks on its election infrastructure? What has to happen to ensure that the 2020 presidential election is secure? In thi...

When a electrical device needs to be a piece of art or used as a mechanical component, a printed circuit board is more than a piece of fiberglass with wires embedded in it. In chemical engineering applications internal holes which allow fluids to be transported through the PCB need to be placed in complex precise patterns. As art, holes can be used to create positive and negative space, allowing y...

TCP/IP is the most widely used protocol on the Internet for transmitting data. But how does it work in detail? This talk will explain the TCP protocol, from handshake over established to teardown in detail - and elaborate a bit on protocol adjustments over time and congestion control. I will briefly explain how computers talk to each other via the Internet Protocol (IP), and explain the transport...

Sigfox is an emerging low-power wide-area network (LP-WAN) technology for IoT devices, comparable to LoRa . This talk recounts my analysis of Sigfox's radio protocol and presents an open reference implementation of an alternative Sigfox protocol stack. It confirms that while Sigfox ensures authenticity and integrity, transmitted payloads are not confidential. This presentation is targeted at a tec...

Die EU-Grenzagentur Frontex nimmt eine Reihe neuer Überwachungsmethoden im Mittelmeer in Betrieb. Die Fähigkeiten zur Beobachtung des sogenannten Grenzvorbereichs gehören zum Grenzüberwachungssystem EUROSUR, das die Europäische Union vor fünf Jahren gestartet hat. EUROSUR vernetzt die Zentrale von Frontex in Warschau mit den Grenzbehörden der 28 Mitgliedstaaten. Über deren nationale Koordinierungs...

Sieben Jahre lang musste den Behörden jedes Stück der versprochenen Aufklärung des NSU-Komplexes abgerungen werden. Das Urteil im ersten NSU-Prozess zeigt: Deutschland ist nur sehr eingeschränkt bereit, rechtem Terror entgegenzutreten und ihn aufzuarbeiten, den Betroffenen, Geschädigten und Überlebenden zuzuhören und ihnen Schutz zu garantieren. Das zu leisten ist unsere Aufgabe: die Aufgabe der G...

Microcode runs in most modern CPUs and translates the outer instruction set (e.g. x86) into a simpler form (usually a RISC architecture). It is updatable to fix bugs in the silicon (see Meltdown/Spectre), but these updates are encrypted and signed, so no one knows how microcode works on conventional CPUs. We successfully reverse engineered part of the microde semantics of AMD CPUs and are able to...

Das fast 60 Jahre alte Cobol wird noch heute von sehr vielen Banken und Versicherungen eingesetzt. Ich erzähle aus meiner langjährigen, nicht selten schmerzhaften, Erfahrung als Cobol-Entwickler in der Großrechner-Umgebung, heute unter anderem mit Blick auf die Security. Um auf die Sicherheitsaspekte eingehen zu können, stelle ich Cobol und die mir bekannte Großrechner-Umgebung kurz vor. Wie alt i...

An (almost) self-contained introduction to the basic ideas of quantum mechanics. The theory and important experimental results will be discussed. Quantum mechanics is one of the two paradigm-changing physical theories of the early twentieth century (the other being special and general relativity). Suddenly, one of the most fundamental physical theories was no longer deterministic: Measurement is a...