33C3 Retrospective

For those who missed it – the 33rd Chaos Communication Congress took place from 27.-30.12.2016 – and it was the last one in Hamburg. And I got a ticket. I haven’t seen a lot of talks, because I spent most of my time walking around the hack area and talking to people.  But here are some of the talk highlights that I can recommend:

1: Shut Up and Take My Money! – The Red Pill of N26 Security

…or how a broken authentication system could lead to corrupt transactions.

 

2: SpiegelMining – Reverse Engineering von Spiegel-Online

David Kriesel, who presented the lovely talk about the Xerox Scanner Bug at 31C3, demonstrates how he used big data to determine internal structures of the Spiegel publishing company. Must see!

 

 

 

The big red IFTTT Button

I’ve built an IoT button a while ago. I’ve also written a short log of the project on hackday.io

The ESP8266, which is used here, is  a small, WiFi-enabled chip which can be programmed. I hooked it up to send web request to IFTTT to trigger actions.

I started with a prototype on a ESP8266 NodeMCU development board. The button causes the ESP to send a web request to IFTTT, which is configured to send a push notification to my iPad in this example, but can trigger nearly any action that is supported by IFTTT.

after testing the firmware on the development board, I flashed it on the chip and put everything together.

IFTTT SmartButton from the inside.Tada! We do now have a battery powered push button for the internet of things.

The finished project