This year an entire crew of NYC Resistor members went to the 32nd Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany. There were four presentations by five members: Caroline Sinder’s When Algorithms Fail in Our Personal Lives (2015-12-30 at 14:00), Matthew Borgatti’s My Robot Will Crush You With Its Soft Delicate Hands! (2015-12-27 at 23:00), my own Thunderstrike 2: more Mac EFI firmware vulnerabilities (2015-12-27 at 20:30) and a joint presentation by Adelle Lin and me on Vector Retrogaming with MAME and XY monitors (2015-12-28 at 18:15).
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As before the Congress Center was decorated and illuminated.
This year's keynote speaker was Fatuma Musa Afrah, who urged us to think of "Newcomers, not Refugees". She was a welcome change from the boy-zone of last year's keynote.
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Joanna Rutowska presented on building stateless laptops and Matthew Garret showed how to use the TPM to generate TOTP tokens (with ASCII art QR codes).
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Jethro Beekman wrote enough wrapper to allow EFI (64-bit) PE applications to run under Linux and used it to decode how his laptop's disk encryption key was derived. Whitney Merril's talk on predicting crime with big data accused us all of thought crimes and asked about the viability of Minority Report pre-crime analysis.
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UK CAGE's presentation (introduced by Jacob Applebaum) The Price of Dissent reinforced the awfulness of GITMO and was very moving. Kurt Opsahl from the EFF discussed the second Crypto Wars and led to much discussion of the active attacks on systems like Juniper.
Caroline Sinder's "Social Media Breakup Coordinator" motivated me to create Twitter XKeyScore, a way to filter your twitter notifications.
3D printing keys with OpenSCAD.
Matthew Garret presented tpmtotp, which I was inspired to port to CoreBoot.
Hanging out with the hackers at the hotel.