A few months ago when I was applying to the CFP for Chcon, I thought, why not also submit to Kiwicon / Kawaiicon as well?
My first Kiwicon was in 2012, and I have been going every year since, and I have always thoroughly enjoyed myself and learnt a lot. I guess it was a bit of a dream that one day I might be able to present a talk at this super cool conference.
Well, I was pretty ecstatic when I got accepted to speak at Kawaiicon!
Kawaiicon is Kiwicon, but cuter. It actually started off as a joke when the Kiwicon organisers forgot to renew the kiwicon.org domain name, and brought kawaiicon.org as a contingency, but I guess this year they followed through and had a cute themed con!
On Friday morning I gave my talk The Story of the “Uncrackable” Lockbox, and Why Hackers Need to Work Alongside Developers. Archive Link.
The talk has been uploaded to Youtube, which you can find below:
You can find a copy of the slides here.
The talk is a heavy rewrite and modified version of the same talk I gave a week previous at Chcon. I tidied up the slides, formatted things to make it easier to follow along with, and compressed the content from 45 minutes to a 15 minute lightning talk.
I actually think the Kawaiicon talk went better than the Chcon talk, and I am very pleased with how it went. I got plenty of positive feedback from attendees that they liked my talk, and it made reverse engineering look interesting, which is awesome to know.
There’s a few photos of me on stage, taken by John Morton, with a CC BY-SA 2.0 license. You can find a collection of photos of the conference here.
At every loot slide, I had arranged with the organisers to get pyro, and they had these amazing spark fountains:
Jason Danner captured a very cool tweet storm of my talk, and I will reproduce it below. Mostly for archival and easy locating in the future. Anyway, Jason, you are an absolute legend. I’ll buy you a drink next time I see you.
Now Matthew is talking about an "unhackable" lock box#Kawaiicon #KawaiiconNZ
— Jason Danner (@jpdanner) October 17, 2019
About TimeLock encryption program:#Kawaiicon #KawaiiconNZ
— Jason Danner (@jpdanner) October 17, 2019
First loot gotten by modifying the conditions in the program to just allow decrypt.#Kawaiicon #KawaiiconNZ
— Jason Danner (@jpdanner) October 17, 2019
Plan of attack for challenge 2#Kawaiicon #KawaiiconNZ
— Jason Danner (@jpdanner) October 17, 2019
Modify the timestamp and... Loot for challenge 2!
— Jason Danner (@jpdanner) October 17, 2019
And sparkles.#Kawaiicon #KawaiiconNZ
Plan of attack for challenge 3#Kawaiicon #KawaiiconNZ
— Jason Danner (@jpdanner) October 17, 2019
And loot 3!#Kawaiicon #KawaiiconNZ
— Jason Danner (@jpdanner) October 17, 2019
Challenge 4 & 5 plan of attack: let's look at the crypto!#Kawaiicon #KawaiiconNZ
— Jason Danner (@jpdanner) October 17, 2019
Its using symmetric encryption...#Kawaiicon #KawaiiconNZ
— Jason Danner (@jpdanner) October 17, 2019
And... Loot 4!#Kawaiicon #KawaiiconNZ
— Jason Danner (@jpdanner) October 17, 2019
And challenge 5 is just... Moar encryption!#Kawaiicon #KawaiiconNZ
— Jason Danner (@jpdanner) October 17, 2019
And... Loot 5!#Kawaiicon #KawaiiconNZ
— Jason Danner (@jpdanner) October 17, 2019
About Matthew!#Kawaiicon #KawaiiconNZ
— Jason Danner (@jpdanner) October 17, 2019
The whole con was a blast, and I met and chatted to a lot of amazing people. I can’t wait for next year!
Matthew Ruffell