12-02, 14:45–15:30 (Africa/Johannesburg), Track 3
“No touch” sensors, the COVID-friendly access control. You don’t touch them, they open. But from how far can you not touch them? Through a glass door perhaps? Join me on a hardware dissection and research journey to see how these things work, determine whether they’re vulnerable to attack, and hopefully defeat them.
HTTP 404
Starting out as an electronic engineer, I quickly learned that my penchant for disassembling things and figuring out how they functioned also meant that I liked breaking things.
I joined the dots to infosec and since around 2013 I’ve been involved in the ZA hacker community. I’ve been helping with conference and meetup organising and badge building for most of the time since then, and in 2023 I made things official by joining the research team at Orange Cyberdefense.
I still tinker with hardware every chance I get, either fixing or improving something I have, or building something new. I’ve already come to terms with the consequences I’ll one day face when I teach my 2 small kids to question and dismantle everything, although my wife has already put a moratorium on bringing home broken electronics because “I’m sure I can fix this”.
I don’t like long walks on the beach because the sand gets everywhere and it smells like fish. I do like mountain biking though. Sorry, did you say “brief?”