Just got back from Vegas and will share some experiences with you….

Lets start with the US lockpick championships:

And the winner is … JGOR!

From the fifty participants that attended the US lockpick championships at the Defcon17 conference, JGOR stood out. It was impressive to see his ‘cool’ way of picking. While his opponents were nervously raking and rapidly moving the tools in and out the lock he was just calmly picking. Setting one pin at the time yet opening locks in impressive times (like 17 seconds in the finals on a lock others did not open). To me it is clear the best man won. Second best was Schuyler Towne, third was a draw between Chris Pentacoff and Tokey (from France!).

By winning the US lockpick championships Jgor won a full paid plane ticket to the European lockpick championships in Turkey next year. It will be interesting to see how well he does there.

Deviant and Babak (Toool.US) did a great job organizing the lockpick village and the various lockpick games. One of the things I admire from Babak and Deviant is their eye for detail. Take for instance the locks used in the games. These locks are connected to an electronic timer that stops when the lock is opened!

Fun:

It is always fun in Vegas. Renderman introduced me to one of his friends who had a little problem with some of her locks. I seem to be losing my touch as I was not able to open the simple lock. Maybe it was the jetlag? After hearing the story, my dear wife Charlotte found an appropriate t-shirt for me at the vendor area two days later. Other fun was meeting some famous people in vegas.

The vendor area:

As you can see on the video above, there was lots of activity at the vendor area. There even was a stand selling bumpkeys (using a slightly NSFW booth-babe). Check the youtube video for details (and a good laugh).

Public and private talks:

I only visited one presentation. Obviously it was the one by Mark Tobias and Tobias Bluzmanis. Han and I spoke with them before the presentation and learned about the details of their attacks on some of the electromechanical Cliq locks. Pretty impressive things they have come up with. They did not go publicly into details on how to bypass these expensive ‘top of the line’ high security locks. Han and I know the Cliq system well as we did conduct our own research for a year now too. And we will go into details when we discuss our research at our presentation at HAR next week. Interesting times we live in ….

Dangerous place:

Defcon is a dangerous place. At least for those that are not computer savvy. The famous ‘Wall of sheep’ was showing (parts of) login data of those not using SSL or other types of encryption when popping mail or transferring files etc….

But even when Defcon is a dangerous place … we all made it back safe. Now preparing for HAR! Hope to see you there!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 22:58 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.