[ Laughter ] Good morning. I'm weaponizing your pets. Let's get started. I'm Gene Bransfield and
a principle engineer. If you spend enough time at me, I love my job. It is a fantastic thing
to awake in the morning and go to work and get paid to do cool stuff. People want my job. The
joke is on them. They cannot have my job. I'm going to be the guy who dies on a Friday of a
long weekend. I'm in the corner. And they clean me up, don't step on the stain, that is the Gene
Bransfield stain in the carpet. This is a story about triumphs and woes and lessons learns. So
weaponize ‑ ‑ weapons your pets. 15% of the world's Internet traffic is dedicated to
cats. We have the whole world at our fingertips and watch cats ‑ ‑ on‑ line, I find most of these
things boring. So I started including pictures of cats and stories around pets. In fact,
this is the picture that started it all. Oh, that is awesome and you know it. So I just finished
one such presentation, somebody came up to me and said I'm going to give you my cat collar, a
GPS chip in it, and it would tell you where the cat was and send you back GPS coordinates.
Now, I need a Wi‑ Fi sniffer and have a war. And a service dog. A lady walked in with a
saddlebags and said, denying of service dog. I said, cool, is there a pineapple. No. He jumps
in your lap and you can't to it. The pineapple is a great idea. Working animals are nothing do.
Military and dogs and bad ass dogs that jump out of military aircrafts into the water. And
then gas mask dogs, the guy is wearing a gas mask, the dog is, too. This guy jumped of the
aircraft at 30,000 feet. That is a bad ass dog. And then we have a real seal. This is the
truth. The navy uses marine animals for defense, and finding mines. If you think you are
stealthy and you're going to blow up the harbor and flipper sniffs out the gopher hole. Back
in the '60's there was a lot of pot going around the CIA. Imagine sitting around the table
saying we're going to take a cat, and put a transmitter in its chest, and a microphone in
his ear and called it acoustic kitty. This actually got funded. I'm not kidding here. Science
and experiment, they brought it out for the test, put the cat down, and listened to those guys
and the cat ran out in traffic. That was the end of the acoustic kitty. At that point they
defunded this, not because it was a bad idea. All of the scientists quit. Screw this,
cats are hard to work with. This is interesting. So put a collar or harness on a cat, rule
number one I don't want to harm a cat, I don't like cats. Rule number one, the cat should be
able to wear stuff comfortably and not any harmed. Form, fi, and function, we don't want
blinking lights, and then, blue light and it is a cat. Wave point and the Wi‑ Fi sniffer
will bring back the stuff and other products out here to deal with your stuff. This camera
that hangs on the collar, none of the solutions do Wi‑ Fi sniffing. I'm good there. I
thought about ways to do this. This is a computer on a stick by kind of expensive. Cotton
candy, computing a stick. Cool solution. The rock chip 3066. You can attack to the back of
your television, and there is an image you can put on this thing. I was having trouble doing that.
I sat sown and had a beer and thought about it, it is small, GPS, Wi‑ Fi and cellular. Any
can idea what that can possibly be? How about a phone? It was in my pocket the entire time.
Good. I can make it. No, they thought of that. You can download this is from the
android store and you can do volunteer war touching anywhere. Now, we need a volunteer cat,
this is Skitzy. This belongs to my friend Reeves. It's 22 inches from base of neck to tip of
tail, 20 inches around the chest and 12 inches around the neck. This is a big damn cat. So I'm
not worried about putting crazy things on him and his friends making fun of him, he'll just
smack them around a little bit. So now we need a cat coat to hold it, and if you Google cat
coat on the Internet, you get pictures of girls wearing coats with cats on it. And if you
Google kitty coat you get other things. So I got a cat with a dog coat in a small enough form
factor. So that's what I did. So now the plan is tech in the cat, coat on the cat, send the cat on
a walkabout and recover data when the cat returns. And then profit. So step one, put the
chip in the coat. Step two, put the coat on the cat. You can see he's thrilled. Send the cat on
the walk about and profit, right? No. That's the backyard. [ Laughter ] So what could have
possibly gone wrong here. It is obvious we didn't put it on tight enough. So the chip in the
coat, and the coat on the cat, and send him on a walk about and we wait. It is 18 hours later
people are freaking out. We are at the backdoor and hear a meow, this is the cat. And the form
factor of the cat going out the door and coming back in. So we failed on that, the last known
GPS location of it is right here. We went there and it is not there. So, so far we learned
that cats are really hard to work with. You should always test your expensive stuff out
before sending it out on a cat someplace. I'm again to need an Amazon prime account. They were
worried about the cat, no more coat. I was talking to my friend, Bill, about this, he
laughed and said why don't you try a small power and consumption, and there are chips
and solutions out there. My first question is what is Arduino? A project with a
researcher in Italy, like his master's thesis. There is open source software out there, and
why not open source hardware. It is cool. Comes in a chip set, you can stack them on it, and
make robot, and remote control car. This guy used it to check the food in his freezer. This
guy used it to make the robot's hand move, and this guy used to cheat on his video games.
Relatively small form factor. The good news with Arduino is Open Source and inexpensive,
until the cat starts loosing them and you have to buy nine of them. Bad news, poorly
documented it can take forever to get to you, an expansion shield, sometimes okay. Cool,
that's great. But I have never done doing, and worked with small chips. I'm not a
professional coder and I have never soldered before. It is solder. Like what. He said,
don't worry, it's easy. The plan is to get some Arduino the stuff, sign on the form factor,
put it together on a collar and figure out something for the denial service dog. So I went
out and bought the how to book. There was guides and learning and reading up on it with
electronics stuff. So I get the flashy stuff flashing and the non flashy things flashing when
they're not suppose to flash. So I said I'm ready to go, need the more advance stuff. Libraries
for Wi‑ Fi, they got it, GPS, they got it. SD card stuff, they got it. So, Jeremyblum.com, this
has a lot of videos on making these things work. I used him religiously. Thank God. I did
all of my research and background investigation, I'm now an expert. I went out and
got a Wi‑ Fi and a GPS child. So my plan is to get the Wi‑ Fi stuff and writing to an SD card
and GPS writing to an SD card, combine the two and then profit. The Wi‑ Fi shield was cool.
Setup, the drivers worked away. And hooked it up and was even mentioned on the Arduino
website, the parameters and variables. Got my solution. That was easy. GPS not so much easy.
A little bit about GPS, the NMEA string is what the satellites are broadcasting up there,
national maritime electronic association. This comma separated value there is what
the satellite is actually sending out and the job of the receive take it in and transmit
to (?) So the GPS boot process is starts up and it doesn't know where it is on the planet. Could
be in your back pocket on Timbuktu. It has to listen to space. So the GPS process was
fairly poorly documented. Get at least satellites to listen to and figure out where it is, this
process can take two to 15 minutes. And if someone is looking over your shoulder it is
going to take 15 minutes. The GPS shield was rather poorly documented. There was no docs in
the kit. It took my several weeks of what is wrong with this, why is it not working.
Finally at the long end of the research effort the baud rate is supposed to be 34,800. I wanted
to give demonstration is how it is poorly documented. Now I go on line and cannot find the it
is 34800. The GPS shield is off to the side. Because I was going to use the pins. I put this
together and combined the code and got this weird error about 80% memory utilization. I see
that on windows blow it off and go for it. They were telling me the truth. 80%, the chip cannot
work. 32K on the memory. The Arduino mega, however, has 256K. And I purchased the mega. Put
that together, messed around with variables, messed around with some stuff and Woo Hoo it
works. A working prototype. So the Arduino 2550, more better mo betta, mo ports. But the size is
not mo better. So I searched all over the internet tried to find something that is ting 2560 from
JK Devices.com. It is a ripoff, I was going to mention it during my talk. Defcon knows about
that. I didn't know about that at a time, I need a Wi‑ Fi chip, you can see the breakout
board chip there, this is the spark cord, I call it the mullet, because Wi‑ Fi in the
front and, Arduino in the back. And of course a GPS chip, and a SD card breakout board. So
the mega worked but the mega mini was four weeks to ship and another solutions are too big in
size and too small in memory. So I went with the spark core that had troubled shipping. So I
borrowed one from Bill, who got me started on this. It is a 32 bit, 128K of memory, SPI, and
12D those are like the protocol chips kind of like the Internet and had that, a TICC3 Wi‑ Fi
chip. It is it compatible? No. People that are a chip head will say yes. If you say it is
Ardiomo compatible , it mean it will work with my external component an I can just cut and
past the code, from one to another and and that's how it works. So this is one thing, the
spark cord is another. I will have to start over again from scratch. That made me not happy.
Despite this problem, the spark was very, very cool. A dedicated core group of
developers I would looking at the code, and one developer would say I would like to do
blah, and then they would stay up all night and blah, I figured this stuff is getting updated. A
shout out to peekay123 who helped me a lot on my project! I figured all this stuff is
getting updated so let's see what happens. Libraries, someone posted SD libraries at the
forums they compiled. Good morning, libraries, they combined and worked with my GPS
shield. Wi‑ Fi libraries not so much. The spark cord bills itself as an Internet of things
device. I'm going to say that a couple of times because it screwed me a couple of times.
So the Wi‑ Fi is in the background as a service, you are coding up front and just connect
you to the Internet. Not there to mess with, but I want to mess with it. The Adafruit board that
I bought the exact same chip. It and it is available library for download. And I messed with it
before. Thomas Edison said I found 100 ways not to make the lightbulb, before making the
lightbulb. I found a lot of ways to make a kitty collar. I messed with these things and had
some SSID scanning stuff and copied and pasted it and put it in there, bam, it worked. Yes.
Now, I have the good morning, working on the spark. The SD compiled on the spark. SSID is
working. Now working with the tiny components that I bout and that means soldering. Who looks
to solder and likes it? Soldering is my new least favorite activity. So for those
getting ready to learn how to solder have rules. Rule number one, don't touch the pointy end.
That's where the hotness is. Rule number two is remembering where you put the soldering iron
down. If you violate rule number two, you're going to violate rule number one. Rule number
three is everything looks so easy on the Internet and it's not. So that not withstanding my
first attempt went well. I put the SD breakout board here, this is my breadboard stuff, the chip
on the left side. There's a core, breakout board, had to solder ends onto the end for and
the GPS antenna. That went pretty good. I'm home testing everything went great. And
getting sniffing, doing stuff, I put it in my yard, the neighbor's Wi‑ Fi, and I took it
on a car ride, and there was massive failure, nothing. Why not? Well, again, the spark is
an Internet of things device, it is never meant not to be connected the Internet. So I was
talking to the guys on the forums and they said turn the chip on and off because it will
suck power. But when you turn it on put the code put it in the status equals Wi‑ Fi on. It is
true if there is a known access point. If I'm a half mile down the road that will not happen. I
could turn on the chip and do my scan before it made a connection. That worked
perfectly. I removed the code from the stuff. That is all that I needed. I'm back on track. So
I took it for a drive and got data back. And so I was popping the into Google Earth. I was
driving on the highway, they had me off in a lake and I was sitting in my house was I
halfway down the block. So I was wondering what was going on. So who posted the GPS library, they
did the NMEA conversion incorrectly. So now I have no GPS libraries. So when I was
working on the Aduino stuff, I had the GPS plus‑ plus ‑ ‑ stuff that I loved to use, so
easy to interact with. And it had everything that I needed. So I needed to find someone to put
the GPS plus plus into the spark and I talked to Bill and said he port libraries. I said how do
you port libraries. He explained it to me like my rocket science story, having drinks in a bar
and somebody and he is a cool guy. What do you do for a living? I'm a rocket scientist.
Seriously. No, seriously, I'm a rocket scientist. That is cool, what do you think about the
phrase, it's not rocket science. I laugh at that, there are science and engineering to
building the rocket and fuel in them, but you put the rocket on the launch pad and hit the red
button and hope for the best. Sometimes it blows up. Sometimes it tips over and blows up.
Sometimes it gets to space and blows up. The hard part is not getting new rockets, the hard
part is getting more monkeys to put in the rocket. That is a rocket science joke. That's how
you port libraries. We changed our Arduino stuff out with the spark stuff, hit compile, listen
to it scream at you and fix what it is screaming about. You keep doing that until it doesn't
scream anymore. If you compiling is screening at you, and you scream back, you succeed at
scaring your wife. I did that for a couple of hours and BAM, it works. I ported libraries. I
was so proud of myself I posted them to github. The next problem is then power consumption, my
buddy Ricky Hill hooked me up with the batteries for model airline stuff. 3.7‑ volts,
500mAh batteries - enough to get a kiddy thing going. So now I'm testing for the optimal power
consumption. The first thing you think of is I will turn everything on, get the stuff,
and turn everything off. Remember, before I told you it can take 2 to 15 minutes to get
the GPS lock. If you turn it off the GPS, you lose the satellite, and you the cat runs into bush
you burn through without getting any data. So the best thing for me, you turn the main micro
controller on and keep the GPS powered and that worked much, much better. Much better,
collections every 30 seconds lasted 4 hours, collections every 10 minutes lasted 8 hours.
So now I have to make a collar. If you thought soldering is fun. Desoldering is twice as much fun
as soldering. Oh, may God, I destroyed so much crap trying to desolder things. The Internet
was not helpful. YouTube looked to easy. I talked to my friend, Joey. Head to your lab and they
will help out. Shout out to the labs in Virginia. Ted, mad scientist, and evil genius
helped me to do this. Did not end up in the final one. And Brian my solder tutor. Taught me
the right iron and the right solder make life a whole hell of a lot easier. So now I can to
make the collar itself. And hard stuff. Man, I don't know how to make a collar. The code thing,
I just learned to solder, but this is like ribbons. So talking to my friend Joe, he said get a
couple of ribbons and sew it together and put your stuff inside of it. So I went down to
Michaels and got myself a ribbon, leopard print is just so in this year for the cats. Now,
I need to sew it together. Who knows to sew, it is 2014. We don't sew, we buy new stuff. It
is a grandmother skill, right? So what do you do? You get a grandmother. So my wife's
grandmother, her name is Nancy. She is very nice to meet you. She was very happy to help me
and there is a dollar bill followed by the battery, the actual collar and the components
all wrapped up to protect things. The spark had flashy bits. Now, back to our volunteer
cat. This bastard still owes me a cell phone. So we're going to send him out with some practice
stuff first and see if he comes back with it. Then I might let him play with the tech. So we
put the collar on him to see if he tolerated it, he tolerate it, and he tolerated marvelously.
This is what it looked like before and what it looks like now. It is all cool, put you can
see the bit behind his head. That is the name collar it is to go on the bottom because the GPS
chip is directly opposite. We have to put a weight on it. Went down to ranger supply. It
is war kit. A bullet. So the cat goes on the collar, and the collar goes on the cat. And the
cat goes for a walk and profit. And the deployments were, nothing. No, no. No. I knew it
works. I grabbed my stuff and went to my buddy's Reeve's house. All of the diagnostics
work working fine. We put the collar on the cat, and the cat, we had a couple beers, the cat
went under a bush and hung out there and licked himself for 20 minutes. He is licking himself.
I said, Reeves is that the cat under the bush. No, walked up. Yes and he grabs the bush and
shakes it. The cat was running. A better deployment process was let the collar set outside 5 to
10 minutes. Bring the cat to the collar, put on the cat and let the cat go for a walk about. So
does this work? Success, bitches. Here is the initial results for obvious reasons.
Somebody contacted me off of the Internet and said I can help you out with visualizing this. Check
this out. Somebody did this for me. It is awesome. I would like to point out I have been working
on this for a good number of months and the damn cat never left the front yard. Yeah.
Furthest he went was the car. My grandmother was saying I would love to know I Coco goes, so we
strapped it up to Coco and got results. I'd like to printout, But we still have WEP and open
Wi‑ Fi hotspots in 2014. Oh, my God. So but cocoa went a lot further as you will see. He
wondered all over the neighborhood. He's going to take a while. He actually caught a
mouse during this deployment that was very, very cool. Really cool results. The cats tolerated
it brilliantly, and it was the fruition of a long bunch of work. I cannot tell you how
happy I was. So that is the war kitty, ladies and gentlemen. [ Applause ] So now we move onto
the Denial of Service Dog admittedly is just trolling. Nothing socially redeeming about
it at all. I have a pineapple I bought at Shmoo, a TV B Gone at Radio Shack, doggie backpack
with the service dog patches on it. There is the pineapple, you know what it is. I had Karma
answering probes and DNS spoof to redirect to the pineapple. And there is a package you can
download that has five or six things that it cycles through as people connect to it. It is
awesome. So he's the TV B Gone., as it comes with my new found soldering skills I turned it,
what was supposed to be this, into this. And the idea being I was going puts saddlebags and
the T.V. in the saddlebag and connect the wires to the outside so the LEDs were on the outside
of the saddlebag. Now I need patches. Holy crap, how hard is it to get somebody to make your
patches. Except on the Internet, 500 of them, $5 a piece. So I beat the streets for quite a
while, and I found a JoAnnes in Sterling,Virginia and they made me a denial of service dog
patch. The Wi‑ Fi thing right there. I have a video demonstration to proof it works
there. There is the denial of service dog stuff. And the LED sticking outside of the
saddlebag. I ran a wire up the leash and have a button in my hand right there. Taped the wire
to the leash. You hit the button right there, you see the little green light, and then they start
flashing on the fruit and then the T.V. will then just turn on. And here's the demonstration
video of it working. You've got, I'm outside somewhere. You will see that the denial of service
dog has this ssid is up. Another thing I did. I'm going to add a Wi‑ Fi hotspot, it is going to
be called Defcon. And I'm filming with one hand and doing the other, forgive me, it took
me a long time. I'm trying to connect. That is me over here, pop up and connect. And go out
to the Internet, excuse us. >> I said welcome to Def Con earlier. We have a tradition here ‑ ‑
and if you've never seen this tradition, it is a wonderful tradition where new speakers get
welcomed to Def Con with an appropriate beverage of choice. [ Applause ] So ‑ ‑ since Gene
has never spoken at Def Con before, we decided to welcome him, even to the extent of
interrupting his presentation. We would like to welcome him to Def Con for the first time
speaker. [ Applause ] >> Good morning. >> Thank you. >> Wow. >> Here is the denial of service
dog. Awesome. So the long story ‑ ‑ let's see, where I was? Yes. I'm playing with this, I wish
there was a way to speed it up. Are we going to go through it all again? That is good stuff.
So I added Def Con to the whole thing. And camera is going to see the probe go out, it is me,
and pull it back into the Wi‑ Fi pineapple. That's how it all works and it works brilliantly.
So it will pop up, bam, I'm Def Con. The funny part I tried to do this later and there is the
Def Con AP. See, I go up, it is like. ¶ [ Music ] ¶ Circus ‑ ‑ dot dot Afro. So I'm going to go
to CNN and it is come to come up, polk‑ a‑ dot polk‑ a‑ dot Afro. That's how that things
works. Now, we need a volunteer dog, to be our denial of service dog. If you ever seen a
Doberman pinscher service dog. Well you have. The denial of service dog. He was so happy, he
ran the yard. I'm so happy, new people, new people. So we dug him inside of the house and put
the backpack on him, he stood like this for 10 minutes. And that's good. Because it allowed
me to take pictures. There is the service dogs in there. And that is going on there. The
first thing the V dog did when he stopped being comatose. What we discovered two things. One
there is now two ways to deploy the TVB Gone, one is the button and the other is the dog shakes.
The other things I discovered and failed to properly secure it into the pouch. Every time he
did that, it well flying all over the place. In the process of doing so completely destroyed
my TVB Gone to the point even with my new soldering abilities I was not able to bring it back.
So next. So the funny thing is ‑ ‑ if it says service dog on your dog's backpack, they will
let you in. [ Laughter ] Mine very clearly said denial of service. But service dog. Yeah.
Sure. Here is the part I tell you one man's video proof to Defcon, is another man's
evidence to court. The truth of the matter is I, was so focused on denial of service dog. I hit
the wrong button on go pro. It has 2 buttons, I hit the wrong one, so I need to go ex KC on
you here. I love to play. Do you mind if we come in. Sure. Do you want something to drink. And
then off here. Peanut jelly time. Peanut butter jelly time. [ Laughter ] I'm taking artistic
license here. Still. So the third our four ‑ ‑ or fourth time the guy came to our table
and said why does it say denial of service dog. Props to this guy, because he was the only one
all day long that asked. We didn't answer him, and he went away. So you go to the sports
bar and hit the bottom. Ball play, and it was the world cup game, just happens to be the
Argentina and you hit the button and it goes away. Never going to give you up. [ Laughter ] So if
you go into a restaurant that has 15 TVs on wall, they are controlled by the back. But one
or two TVs on the wall. They are not. Just saying. So then ‑ ‑ yeah. He is happy. Then we go
into a J random box store someone. And the V dog is like I love you. We're walking around
the owner has his leash in one hand and his hand on the backpack. This is not a service
dog. But nobody ‑ ‑ and the guy is like do you mind if we come in. Sure. Make sure that he
doesn't poop on anything. This actually happened. And then we go back to the TV section, and,
of course, the V dog was like squirrel, we hit the button and the thing goes up and the
television goes away, yeah! We did wonderful things. Circus, afro circus, Afro. So according
to the results several victims connected the denial of service dog. I cannot definitively proof
anyone connected why we are out I took artistic license, however when giving this presentation to
my company, people were hacked right and left. It's Gene. Only one person asked about the
denial of service dog. Most people just said nice doggie. What have we learned? A tech
hobbyist with no experience can create a war collar in relatively short time. You can
do this, too. I didn't go a damn thing about this stuff when I was started. But I kept at it
and in 2014 there are unsecured hotspots. And lot of devices still probed for stuff. There is
no patch for human stupidity and cats and dogs really hard to work with. I have to give a
shout out to all of these devices. JK devices they are terrible. Don't go there.
Reeves, still, Joe, Joey, Nancy, Bill, the spark.io guys, the app guys, V-dog, Skitzy CoCo,
Tenacity, and, of course, Defcon, I'm so proud to be here. [ Applause ]