BSidesDayton 2019 Write-up
About a year ago, a few members of the DEFCON Group 937 decided that they wanted to try and host an information security conference in the Dayton area. At the time that we decided to do this, there was only one other large infosec conference in the Dayton area, the Ohio InfoSec Forums Summit.
We settled on creating a franchise of the BSides event network. For those who are unfamiliar, BSides is a community-driven network of information security conferences. Each conference is independent from each other and is usually put on by someone who is local to the area. It’s free to create your own version of the event and there is a large amount of brand recognition and community behind the BSides name. In Ohio, there was already three yearly BSides events, BSides Cincy, BSides Columbus, and BSidesCleveland. Our event would make it four.
Since this was going to be our first event, we decided to keep it small. The conference ended up being 3 hours long and consisted of two presentations that were 45 minutes each. Tickets were free and we ended up selling 29 of them.
Participants getting food during the lunch break
For the venue, we decided to go with Jimmie’s Ladder 11. It is a bar that used to be a fire station in the heart of Dayton and is very close to the University of Dayton. We utilized their party room upstairs, which included a projector.
We had three total submissions for our call for papers. We ended up choosing the talks from Jerod Brennen and Jeremy Hong.
Jerod’s presentation was titled Hacking Identity: A Pen Tester’s Guide to IAM. The presentation was about tips and tricks for circumventing and protecting identity and access management (IAM) in an enterprise setting. You can watch the full presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJaXhAn6JI8
Jerod Brennen giving his presentation.
Jeremy’s presentation was titled PCB Reverse Engineering. The presentation was about printed circuit boards (PCB) and techniques to reverse engineer and protect against reverse engineering the boards. You can watch the full presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lugoLoigVI0
Jeremy Hong giving his presentation
We recorded the conference using a Sony Alpha A7II for the camera and a Zoom H1 as the lavalier microphone. This worked okay but I wouldn’t really recommend it. The H1 was not connected to the camera so we had to manually sync the audio in post.
There are definitely some things that we want to change for next year.
The biggest item on the list is getting live streaming going for the event. We want to be able to broadcast the event live so that those who live remotely are able to watch the conference as it is happening.
Make a checklist of equipment to pack. A few things were left at home and it made it very inconvenient to work around.
Expanding the call for papers section. There wasn’t a place for the speaker’s bio and picture and we had to reach out to them for it so that we could display it on the website.