VERY COOL - Michelle - glad to hear you are engaged with the hack-a-sat!
Robert MacHale . KE6BLR FCC Licensed Radio Operator . http://www.aprsat.com/predict . http://www.spaceCommunicator.club%C2%A0 . Supporting Boy Scout Merit Badges in Radio, Robotics, and Space Exploration Silly Joke: What did the little mountain say to the bigger mountain? Hi Cliff! He who dares not offend cannot be honest. -- THOMAS PAINE
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self. -- ERNEST HEMINGWAY
On Thursday, August 6, 2020, 10:25:17 AM PDT, Michelle Thompson via AMSAT-BB amsat-bb@amsat.org wrote:
Greetings all,
There's a major event happening this weekend with a very large amateur radio satellite component.
It's DEFCON. This year it's virtual and free to attend!
DEFCON draws 30,000 people interested in improving technology and themselves.
In the past, amateur radio and AMSAT have been well represented, presented, and promoted at WiFi Village, Ham Radio Village, and Hardware Hacking Village. It's been a real pleasure to present amateur satellite work at DEFCON because the audience is receptive, educated, interested, and supportive. Every time we have a booth or talk, the feedback is overwhelmingly positive.
The largest US amateur radio licensing session on record happened at DEFCON a couple of years ago. Amateur radio is alive and well.
This year, a number of AMSAT members have participated in another aspect of DEFCON: The competitions!
There are a lot of competitions at DEFCON. They range from silly to extremely difficult multi-day technical ordeals.
This year, the Air Force sponsored a high-end competition called Hack-a-Sat.
For the qualifying event, amateur radio satellite service enthusiasts were recruited. Our practical knowledge and interdisciplinary can-do spirit was something that I thought would provide a unique advantage in a competition ordinarily dominated by networking and computing information security professionals.
This strategy worked. An interdisciplinary team finished 20th out of over 1500. You can find reports about it in the -BB archive.
Unfortunately, while 20th place is a remarkable achievement, that meant that team missed out on the finals, as only the top 10 moved on.
However, I have some news! A number of us hams were recruited by teams that finished in the finals. There will be several AMSAT engineering volunteers participating in the final event this weekend. I'm on ADDVulcan along with several others.
We are very excited to represent amateur radio in an event put on by the Air Force to explore current and pressing security issues with satellite technology.
For the finals, the teams each received a flatsat. The challenges in the competition are both "virtual", meaning code only, and also "real", meaning having to do with the flatsat hardware.
If you want to follow along, there will be coverage and content at https://www.hackasat.com/
Some inside baseball: The team that won the semifinals is a famous engineering competition team called PPP. They have withdrawn from the finals because they also have a team in the "main" computing CTF at DEFCON, and could not field both teams at once.
ADDVulcan finished 4th, and has strengthened their position through recruiting and practice.
So, I think it's fair to say that amateur radio satellite service people have a chance to contribute to a possible win at an international elite competition. Everyone here should be very proud of what our license and hobby enables.
Some of the things we've had to learn with respect to tools are Core Flight System (NASA open source) and COSMOS, from Ball Aerospace. We've also been given an opportunity to see what the Air Force believes are the 1) current capabilities of the technical community and 2) what the threat models might be.
I look forward to sharing what we learn and how we do with all of you.
These are the sorts of things I think AMSAT should be supporting and sponsoring. It's well within our capabilities as a community to host competitions like this one, where the goal of the challenges is to produce quality open source work that solves particular problems. If you are interested in doing something like this, then I'm here to help make it happen. Get in touch and let's see what we can come up with!
-Michelle W5NYV _______________________________________________ Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author, and do not reflect the official views of AMSAT-NA. Not an AMSAT-NA member? Join now to support the amateur satellite program! Subscription settings: https://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb