There’s a really close intersection between the sort of people who attend LISA and those who read MAKE magazine. We all love to build stuff and tinker.
That’s the thinking behind a special evening program on Monday night we’ve arranged for this year’s LISA. We’ve invited two frequent contributors to the magazine (one of which is on their tech advisory board) to come and talk to us about their work and the philosophy behind the new resurgence of do-it-yourself-ing behind MAKE. They’ll also be bringing a bunch of stuff for attendees to see and play with after their talks.
(added bonus: the first 100 people attending the talk will receive a free copy of the magazine, courtesy of the nice people at MAKE magazine. If you’ve never seen the magazine, here’s a special online sampler for people reading this blog.)
Here’s the info on the talks for this special evening:
Talk I: Tweaking, Bending, and Making: Stories of a Hardware Hacker
Joe Grand, Grand Idea Studio, Inc.
Never before has the do-it-yourself ethos been so popular. Bolstered by loose-knit communities of curious tinkerers and O’Reilly’s new quarterly MAKE magazine, tweaking, hacking, and bending have all but reached the mainstream. Behind the projects lie individuals with the drive to make something better, to modify a product to do something it was never intended to do, or to just create something out of the ordinary. This approach to problem solving should be familiar to the USENIX community.
In this fun and light-hearted session, Joe Grand, electrical engineer and obsessed inventor, will tell his story and that of MAKE magazine. Armed with some interesting, wacky, and/or curious hardware hacks, Joe will provide a show-and-tell that will hopefully motivate you to embrace the Maker mindset in your own lifestyle.
Joe Grand is the President of Grand Idea Studio, Inc. (www.grandideastudio.com), a San Diego-based product research, development, and licensing firm, where he specializes in the invention and design of consumer electronics, video game accessories, and toys. Joe is the author of several books, including Hardware Hacking: Have Fun While Voiding Your Warranty and Game Console Hacking. He is on the Technical Advisory Board and is a Contributing Writer for MAKE magazine.
Joe is also a globally recognized figure in computer security. He has testified before the United States Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and is a former member of the legendary hacker collective L0pht Heavy Industries. Joe holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from Boston University.
Talk II: Hacking Silicon: Secrets From Behind the Epoxy Curtain
Bunnie Huang, bunnie studios, LLC
I’ll talk about basic methods and theory behind silicon hacking:
- motivation
- examples of silicon-based security
- overview of methods for decapsulating silicon chips
- methods for imaging chips
- theory behind deciphering silicon chips (briefest introduction)
- practical example of hacking a PIC microcontroller to recover data from security fused regions
Bunnie Huang (www.bunniestudios.com) has a strong background in silicon design and reverse engineering. bunnie completed his PhD at MIT on computer architecture, with an emphasis on the big-picture silicon implementation issues of large scale parallel machines. During the course of his studies, bunnie reverse engineered cryptographic keys out of the Xbox hardware and published his findings in CHES (Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems) and in a book titled Hacking the Xbox. bunnie’s professional experience in silicon design (which includes 802.11b/Bluetooth radios, 10 Gigabit transceivers, CMOS photonics, and various prototype chips for silicon devices research) combined with his reverse engineering expertise gives him a unique perspective on silicon hacking.
Register for the conference here.
