Kate Temkin & Mikaela Szekely
Kate Temkin leads the software development team at Great Scott Gadgets. Kate is a seasoned USB researcher, and maintains a variety of open-source hardware and software tools, including FaceDancer and GreatFET, and has discovered a number of well-known USB vulnerabilities– including CVE-2018-6242, which famously allowed full exploitation of the Nintendo Switch. When not researching hardware security herself, her passions include making hardware and reverse engineering more accessible to everyone who wants to learn.
Kate has given talks at venues including the CCC, Hardwear.io, ShmooCon, ToorCon, TROOPERS, and many more-- including appearances as a keynote speaker. She also has authored full curricula for several university-level engineering courses, and routinely gives trainings on USB security.
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Mikaela Szekely is an open-source software and hardware enthusiast with a long-standing interest in USB, embedded systems, and the (ab)use of arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities on video game consoles. At the confluence of these interests, she maintains “fusée-launcher”, an open-source USB exploit tool and firmware loader for the Nintendo Switch. When not maintaining her own tools, Mikaela contributes to a variety of open-source projects, makes truly terrible puns, and hones her computer science skills in scenic Colorado.
Sessions
USB seems hard -- and it shouldn't. A serious lack of inexpensive tooling has made this relatively simple (and near-omnipresent) protocol seem overwhelming -- to the point where even 'highly-secured' targets ignore USB as a vector for hacking and reverse engineering. In this talk, we discuss our efforts to dispel USB's aura of mystery -- and empower hackers and engineers to observe and interact directly with USB using a set of open-source tools that includes analyzers, fuzzers, and a variety of other USB-poking hardware and software.