GRCon 2016 Wireless Hacking Challenge

Show off  your radio hacking skills during this year’s Wireless Hacking Challenge during the GNU Radio Conference!

Bastille Networks is putting together a multi-frequency, multi-protocol, multi-complicated series of RF puzzles, and will be awarding the winner and runner up with a prize each (USRP B200mini in a custom case!).

To keep it interesting for anyone that wishes to attempt the challenge, we will keep puzzle details light here. However we can reveal:

• The puzzles will be broadcasting through each of the conferences days during official hours.
• Contestant registration and tracking will be done through a web interface.
• Puzzles will be designed to have increasing difficulty: the first one will be really easy for anyone to find. Once you complete a stage, there will often be a hint to send you in the right direction for the next stage.
• Puzzles and/or their hints may be released/made more obvious over the course of the week, depending on participant progress.
• We will make it quite obvious when the final stage has been completed.
• You must complete all the puzzles to win.
• You should have a hacking setup that includes a recent distribution of GNU Radio, a SDR that is capable of reception and transmission on a wide range of frequencies, and be able to run Python snippets and the usual cmake/make/make install(/ldconfig).

Time allowing, we will attempt to deploy a secure Over-The-Air ‘puzzle solution’ system, so you will need to interact with the Challenge system to let it know you have successfully completed the puzzle. More details to come.

Tools to enable general spectrum scanning/plotting and demodulation (e.g. baudline, Gqrx, HDSDR) provide a good starting point.

Several members of the Bastille Research team will be around to help if you need any assistance.

Good luck!

Balint Seeber