Hardwear.IO Wall Challenges - Q&As and Extras!

 Some post-conference extras for the Wall Challenges...

Thanks to everyone who entered the Wall Challenges!

The concept of giving the answer away right at the start, and then making the challenge explaining 'why' each question led to that answer, seemed to be very popular! We got more than twice the number of entries compared to the previous Wall Challenge. The email inbox was very busy - there were 65 emails from entrants. And the Discord channel was melodious and mellifluous (and not discordant!).

Questions

If you didn't enter, and want to get the same experience, here are just the 'questions':

https://youtu.be/cYKE2tgw-eY

Just pause the video whilst you think...

Answers

And if you want to know the 'whys', then here are the 'answers':

https://youtu.be/RepW5VTb09c

One final thought about the entries: If there had been a prize for 'Most beautifully and clearly laid-out entry', then Loïse from Brightsight would have won... Unfortunately there was only one prize (for the winner), but my congratulations for a very organised answer! 

Resources

Some entrants did more than just explain why the answer is connected to the question, they provided links to online resources that they used as well. Here are a couple of links to explore:

https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/

CyberChef is a brilliant toolkit for transforming text (and data) in many ways. It makes all sorts of interesting processing quick and easy to carry out, and can save lots of paper and pencil sharpening. The source is a very good indicator of just why Wall Challenges are 'Security Training in Disguise'. 

👍👍👍👍👍  (5 thumbs-up!)

https://www.dcode.fr/en

dCode is another set of excellent tools that can be very useful in manipulating text and data - plus a lot of other miscellaneous operations and functions. 

👍👍👍👍👍  (5 thumbs-up!)

Both of these should definitely be in your toolkit!

Oh, yes, and I can neither confirm nor deny that I may have used some of these online resources (as well as paper, pencil and pen) to create the challenges... 

https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/number/decimal-to-binary.html

Not quite in the same league as the above two examples, but still useful...

👍👍👍  (3 thumbs-up!)

Previously on Wall Challenges...

There are more wall challenges, door quizzes and wall games that I have produced over the years. Caution: many of these are considerably more difficult than the ones above.

2020 HWIO Virtual Conference:       Q            https://youtu.be/M7MWse68EJo

                                                            Q&A     https://youtu.be/_chBxq4P_5Y

2018 Hardwear.io Conference            Q           https://youtu.be/O34eoI9H3bM

                                                            Q&A     https://youtu.be/n_TAkt6uziw

MinamiCon 22                                    Q           https://youtu.be/civb19tgF2k

                                                            Q&A     https://youtu.be/foF3jxud3oE

If you browse through my YouTube channel, then you will find even more challenges... (No prizes!)

Ah!

Yep. There's a deliberate error in the example question shown at the start of this blog post. Can you figure out what it is? There's a clue in the picture...

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Hardwear.IO 2020 Wall Challenges

The Hardwear.IO conference is online on the 1st and 2nd of October 2020, and they used me for some of the pre-publicity! As usual, I've submitted some Wall Challenges for people to try and solve, and here's a visual clue that may or may not help...

My Wall Challenges are a way to get you to look at the world differently. Hardware is an interesting mix of the old, the new, the obscure and the arcane, and often requires you to think in two or more directions at once. 

Here's an example of multi-directional thinking: 

You have hired a pen-tester company to check your latest piece of hardware. The tester starts their analysis by trying to brute-force the hidden RS232 terminal via the pins that you tried to obfuscate by spreading them across the board, not silk-screening them, and making them look like ATE test-points and unpopulated thru-holes. Of course, the tester finds them disarmingly quickly. The User ID is totally obvious, and the password is just 8 numbers. so you are expecting that to be cracked pretty quickly as well. But after a day or so, the tester is not looking happy, and has not gleefully told you the UID and password. What might be happening?

1. One of the developers lied to you and deliberately set a very long password.

2. There's a bug in the terminal login code and it won't actually accept any password!

3. The tester thinks the obvious User ID must be a honey trap, and is trying other routes into your micro-controller.

4. The tester's USB-to-Serial adapter is broken.

5. The tester hacked your hardware in a few minutes, has all of your micro-controller code, and has IDA'd it so he knows just about everything about how it works - but is worrying that it was too easy and doesn't dare tell you!

Actually, the tester's brute force programme was broken and wasn't brute forcing at all... 

Post-conference Wall Challenge Extras: 

https://securitytiruces.blogspot.com/2020/10/hardweario-wall-challenges-q-and-extras.html

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If you find my writing helpful, informative or entertaining, then please consider visiting the following links for my Synthesizerwriter alias (I write several blogs, but it makes sense to only have one 'Coffee' donation link!):

Buy me a coffee

Synthesizerwriter's Store (New 'Modular thinking' designs now available!)