DEF CON 31: The Lonely Hard Drive, and a very large Betty Pagefile

DEF CON 31 is a bit of a blur. Mostly a good one.

I spent most of it helping run The Lonely Hard Drive, which was one of the most fun and most exhausting things I’ve ever packed into a single con.

DC30 to DC31

The Lonely Hard Drive is a DEF CON contest built on an extremely simple premise: hand people free hard drives and see what happens.

For DEF CON 31, we handed out literal hard drives. Real ones. Each one had a CTF loaded onto it.

You take a drive, plug it in (you monster), and suddenly you’re falling down a rabbit hole of puzzles and challenges, finding flags and climbing the leaderboard toward prizes.

The idea started the year before with FragileDuck from the DC207 crew. For DC31, he turned it into an official contest.

It rewards the one instinct every security person spends their entire career trying to unlearn:

Ooh, a free drive. Let’s see what’s on it.

Hard Drives Are... Hard

I originally got involved through DC207 to help with the money side of the project. We hosted the website and landing pages, and we paid for the drives and cables.

Turns out buying an absurd mountain of hard drives from a manufacturer in China is a whole project by itself.

First you order the drives. Then you arrange for custom labels. Then you clone the CTF onto every single one of them.

At that quantity, cloning the drives is not an afternoon project. It’s a week or two of drives running around the clock.

Then the team decided to heat-seal all of them in anti-static bags. That meant a bunch of us sitting around, packaging drives by hand like the world’s nerdiest holiday assembly line.

It was tedious. It was also genuinely kind of wonderful.

That unglamorous backstage work is what makes the shiny, fun part possible. I’d take an evening sealing drives with good people over almost any panel.

Chips Ahoy!

At some point during the con, I found $200 on the casino floor. So, obviously, I spent it on putting another chip inserted into my hand.

I’d been wanting another implant, and finding $200 in Vegas seemed like the universe giving me a very specific kind of grant.

The chip lights up when it gets near an energy field, which is extremely cool. It does work. I just have to wait for the swelling to go down before I can properly enjoy the tiny light someone injected into me through what was basically a straw.

So now I have two implants.

I found $200 on a casino floor and left Vegas with more hardware in my body than I arrived with.

Chips Ahoy!

The Parting Gifts

Also, I got COVID.

DEF CON sent me home with the traditional souvenir, and it was its own special flavor of miserable. Ask me how the trip ended. Actually, don’t.

The honest version is that COVID wasn’t the only rough part. Any project run by a passionate pile of volunteers eventually reaches a point where people stop agreeing. A lot of things that had never quite been settled got settled all at once.

After DC31, I decided not to come back for the next version of the contest.

There’s no big drama to air and no hard feelings. Volunteer projects get complicated, especially when everyone cares a lot. Sometimes you can be proud of something, love the time you spent doing it, and still know when you’re done.

I’m proud of what we built. I’m glad I was there. And I’m glad I knew when to step away.

-Marbaṩ