Last year, I wrote a post outlining some of my focus points for the rest of the year. This is a review of those tasks and an updated perspective for the next year. Last Year Hardware Security Projects Last year, I generically noted that I’d like to get into more hardware security projects. I took on the Juke Box project which was a mixture between hardware hacking, radio, and mobile.

Spicy Mango is a project that Chris Centore started and presented on at Derbycon this year. It’s difficult to describe completely but in essence, it is an intelligence collection and analysis engine that helps you parse large amounts of data to extract items of interest. For example, say that you wanted to keep track of your nym and how it was used on the net. You could do something like a Google Alert that sends you an email every time “AntiTree” appears in the search engine.

I love excessively documented things. Design documents, protocols specs…whatever and Tor is one of those projects that I’ve always loved to randomly poke around into. I got sucked into Tor’s source code today and was entertained by the results. Beware, crypto time suck ahead. ControlPort Tor is controllable by making socket connections to it’s aptly named “ControlPort” usually on port 9051. The control port is not enabled by default if you’ve just installed Tor on Ubuntu or something, but it is enabled on the Windows packages that use front-ends like Vidalia.

Late next week, JustBill and I will be presenting at Defcon/303 Skytalks in Las Vegas. The presentation, Jukebox Jacking, is a project I’ve been working on for longer than I want to admit. The short version is that I’ve been messing around with a jukebox in my spare time as a weird side project. It started out as just a mobile hacking project and then turned into RF and hardware hacking.