Chaos Communication Congress 2015 (32c3) Report

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I just came back from the 2015 Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany — my brain is going to need some time to process everything that I’ve experienced in the past week.

The congress is in some sense a combination of Burning Man and DEFCON. Four days of nonstop talks, workshops/assemblies, impromptu parties and projects, capture the flag, and much more. Some of the things we did there (this counts for about 0.01% of the available activities):

  • Attend talks about a huge number of topics, ranging from Open-Source intelligence, hardware trojans, the Tor network, privilege-dropping frameworks in Unix and Linux, reverse engineering, quantum computing and cryptography, journalism, politics and law, etc.
  • Drink huge amounts of Mate.
  • New friends and drinking buddies!
  • Whisk(e)y tasting.
  • Participate in a CTF contest.
  • Play around at a lockpicking workshop.
  • Talk to tons of programmers, infrastructure people, security specialists, journalists, artists, tinkerers, hobbyists, and other computer-folk.
  • etc.

I’ll spend some time posting the talks I enjoyed the most — if you’re interested in sorting through them yourself, here are some links:

 

 

Talks (in English): https://www.youtube.com/user/CCCen/videos

Pictures from the Event on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hashtag/32c3?f=images&vertical=news

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Computer_Club

Official Site: https://www.ccc.de/en/

 

For those of you who are interested, here’s the first talk I recommend watching. It covers a huge amount of information about how the great firewall of China (GFW) works, along with some cutting-edge research into bugs/circumvention/information-leakage:

 

 

Enjoy!