Building my first SAO: A beginner’s guide to building and distributing your own SAO
2023-10-07 , Track 2

Electronic badges are becoming more and more popular at conferences. They range from very simple, like a PCB powering a single LED, to something much more complex with LEDs, sensors, and buttons. Many conference badges provide an option for users to "add on" to the main badge by means of connecting an SAO ("simple" add-on). This is a great way to get your organization's brand out there. In short, it makes for really great swag and something conference goers will treasure. I will talk about my recent efforts and partnership to create and distribute an SAO for my local hacker/infosec community at an infosec conference earlier this year. Participants earned their SAO by completing a CTF challenge. We had great engagement with the CTF and we had pre-built SAOs ready to go but also gave participants the option to take their SAO board and assemble their own. I will share lessons learned and provide a playbook if you are interested in doing the same for your group.

I am currently a Red Teamer at Walmart. I am passionate about all things related to offensive security. I have built and deployed incident response tooling to aid in cyber investigations. I am a long time programmer and I love doing development in Golang, Python, and JavaScript. I have experience with a number of other programming and scripting languages. I also help organize events for ArkanSec, a local hacker/infosec group in my area.