CypherCon 2023
Learning to Manipulate Safe Dials
Dustin Heywood (Evil_Mog)
Abstract:
EvilMog has a decent collection of black badges, but he wants more. Every year CypherCon has an acrylic safe. After spending all of CypherCon 5 getting defeated by TyMkrs electronic badges he decided to change his approach.
He has been learning safe manipulation and will do a live demonstration on stage of safe manipulation techniques as well demo safe manipulation software with a rotary encoder on the contest safe.
This could either be an epic win, or a complete and utter failure. Fortune favors the bold and Mog will win or fail spectacularly trying before a live studio audience.
Importance: I’m writing this talk because safe dials intrigue me and why not learn a new skill, also why not entertain the audience at the same time. Previous years were defeated with acoustic methods. Apparently this years disk packs will defeat that attack so its time to get creative.
Rough outline: I’m ordering 2k worth of manipulation hardware because I’m crazy. This may work, this may not, but the failure will be epic, and the lifetime win even more so.
Also I’ve got black badges to thotcon, defcon, and derbycon, so this is really for bragging rights and because somebody needs to do something fearless. Secretly I’m super scared this may not work but YOLO.
Dustin Heywood (Evil_Mog)
MUD Man
Evil_Mog is the Bishop of the Church of Wifi, Chief Architect and Senior Technical Staff Member for X-Force Red, and an avid shenanigator. In the real world he is known as Dustin Heywood. He has been cracking passwords for decades and is a member of Team Hashcat (retired). In his team hashcat days he brought massive computing clusters and his pattern recognition skills to bear at the annual CrackMeIfYouCan Competition. In his spare time he hangs out with his cats, rides motorcycles, does movie grade pyrotechnics, and plots world domination.