I split my time between networking and talks. My goal was to meet people and learn about projects that I can do to increase my knowledge. One of my main goals was to learn more about radios and determine what projects I could do to learn more about wireless communication.
Friday:
I went an introductory talk at the RF village by Exploding Lemur (real name: ). I got a crash course in electromagnetic (EM) waves and how they are generated in a circuit and used to send data. I learned about Maxwell’s equations in my Physics E&M class last term and I enjoyed connecting the theory to real life. I also learned about the Nyquist Sampling Theorem, which states that that a signal should be sampled at a rate at least two times to frequency to avoid aliasing. Aliasing is when a low sample rate causes the detected wave to have a greater wavelength (include photo). The speaker mentioned also that the HAM radio village would be a great place to learn about applications.
I then went to a more networking focused panel about careers in cyber (labeled as a fireside chat). I met the speakers afterward and asked for resources.
Saturday:
I went to a talk about the LoRa protocol and how it works. Since it is a closed source protocol, the demodulation patterns have to be reverse engineered through wireless spectrum monitoring.
I also went to a talk about stingrays. These are essentially a box of SDRs used to spy on someone’s cellular data traffic by spoofing a cell tower and recording the packets.
Sunday:
I went to a “fireside chat” for people that are just getting started in the field. I will definitely follow up with the people I met. The speakers recommended following up with people, setting up a virtual sessions and asking about their journey to get advice.
Takeaways:
I am going to create a “Homelab” for each of the projects that I want to work on. I will set up a self-hosted AppFlowy (open source Notion) to ensure I have a system for documentation and self management. I have determined three potential projects I want to do (ranked in order of my level of interest):
- Upskill my RF knowledge: Get my ARRL license and become a HAM radio operator. I will start out with an analog setup for voice. Then I want to set up a digital software defined radio (SDR) for messaging and voice. I will also make my own antennas, as per the advice of the speaker, Jon Morlez. Antenna design is an art within itself.
- As a sub project, I learned that you can do a form of radio messaging over LoRa (LoRa APRS). I want to experiment with setting this up since the hardware is way cheaper (you can use ~$20 Heltec V3 Esp32 LoRa microcontrollers for this).
- As an additional sub project, I want to learn about how you can decode signals without the source code. Examining LoRa packets using something like a HackRF is a great way to do this.
- Set up a cellular 4G/5G lab. I want to learn about how telecom infrastructure works. What better way than setting up my own mock version? The stingray talk inspired this project idea.
- Set up a server with a bunch of VMs running windows and flavors of linux for me to set up purple teaming challenges (writing my own malware/backdoors, setting up SOC and blue team tools to try to catch my own malware). This project will help me develop my software skills. As Professor Sergey says, malware “is a certificate of software understanding.”
Furthermore, I want to upskill my networking knowledge. Networking is the basis of the internet. I can do this through PWN college challenges and Portswigger labs.
In additional to the larger scale lab projects, I will keep working on pwn.college challenges. I want to add practical reverse engineering to this by looking at old routers and embedded devices with less security (practice identifying JTAG/UARTs, dumping flash for firmware/user info, decompiling, etc.). This is the kind of thing I can do during weekends to get used to the process.
