Have you ever wondered what is clogging your Internet connection? Or if you ever use (or get) the bandwidth you pay for? The best way to know is to measure.

This presentation will discuss how to retrieve data from sources ranging from Linux hosts to network and IoT devices using collectd, then storing and graphing the data using InfluxDB and Grafana. The intended audience is technically-inclined home users and system administrators.

Lightning Talks: Have something you would like to present, but don’t have enough material for a full talk? Here’s your chance. Talk about anything Linux related.

Hackfest: Bring your hardware to get help with it or just to show it off.

Most of what we’ve been told over the years about what makes a good password has been wrong, so it’s no surprise most people pick bad passwords. This talk will cover the history of password policy and password cracking starting from the days when Richard Stallman hacked the passwords forced on his MIT computer lab because he considered passwords an authoritarian method of control. Next I’ll discuss the golden days of password guessing featured prominently in movies like Hackers and WarGames.

Then I’ll move to the tech boom and the introduction of draconian IT policies like password rotation and password complexity and the dirty little leet-speak password secrets they led to. As we get closer to the modern day I’ll discuss the “correct horse battery staple” password renaissance and more modern approaches to password cracking spawned by tools like oclhashcat and giant password databases dumps like the RockYou hack.

I’ll finish up with modern attempts to fix the password auth problem such as new approaches to secure password generation in password managers or schemes such as diceware as well as cover password auth reinforcements like the different forms of 2FA (including U2F) and Facebook’s new approach to “I forgot my password” workflows. By the end everyone should have plenty of ammunition to take back to their IT department and get rid of those horrible password policies.

Description: Let’s Encrypt is a way for anyone to enable TLS (as in, HTTPS) support to a webserver at no cost. However, there are many security considerations involved with everything from certificate renewal to safe handling of the various files involved. In this talk and live demo I’ll cover how to create a reverse proxy using the nginx webserver that simultaneously allows multiple webservers to exist at one IP address and show how isolating Let’s Encrypt to a different system increases security. The talk will also cover more secure (and less risky) methods of automatic key renewal than the official, somewhat invasive renewal tool.

ContinuingLogo is a recently written interpreter for the Logo programming language that is still in pre-alpha. It is mostly compatible with Brian Harvey’s UCBLogo interpreter and has some graphic and sound features inspired by Atari Logo for the Atari 800. Logo was created at MIT and BBN in the late 1960s as a language to support children in learning mathematical and logical thinking. Its most well known feature is turtle graphics, in which a “turtle” moves around on the screen as instructed, drawing a trail behind it.

This talk will consist of a brief tour of some of ContinuingLogo’s basic features, followed by demonstrations of several short example programs. Language demos will include an incredibly short pig Latin translator. Graphics demos will include spirals, fractals, line followers, and a traffic simulation. Sound demos will include the generation of music and sound effects, and illustrations of the relationship between sound frequencies and perceived musical notes. A few larger games will be demonstrated but not discussed line by line.

Working on an engineering project with more than one person is hard enough when everyone is in the same room. It’s more difficult when you have a team spread around the world and even more interesting if you’re working on a shared physical device. In this talk, I’ll discuss a remote engineering environment I created that allows contributors to connect to a standard Linux user account with a shared terminal (tmux), shared desktop (x2go with desktop sharing enabled), power and data control for a device under test (serial over USB), and even streaming video for viewing camera feeds (RTMP streaming from OBS Studio and viewed in VLC). This wide-ranging talk is appropriate for all levels of experience and will primarily be a series of live, remote demos.

Update: Allan has posted a video of the talk on YouTube.

Lightning Talks: Have something you would like to present, but don’t have enough material for a full talk? Here’s your chance. Talk about anything Linux related.

Elections: After the last lightning talk concludes we will hold our annual elections.

Hackfest: Bring your hardware or software project to get help with it or just to show it off.

The Epiphany is a processor that tries to combine the best attributes of a CPU and a GPU. The Parallella is a single-board computer that runs Ubuntu, originally designed as a showcase for the Epiphany chip. I backed the original Kickstarter campaign for the Parallella in 2012. I will talk about my experience with the fundraising campaign, how the Epiphany and the Parallella are different from their predecessors, and the strengths and weaknesses of the Epiphany in practice.

Update: William has posted his slides.

Capture the Flag tournaments have long been used to test hacker skills but they can also serve as effective security training for developers. This talk will feature a case study where I turned teams of developers with no prior security training against each other in a CTF arena featuring their own applications and watched them rack up points as they popped shells in each other’s applications.

This will be an encore presentation of a DEF CON talk given August 5th at 4:00 PM. TASBot is an augmented Nintendo R.O.B. robot that can play video games without any of the button mashing limitations us humans have. By pretending to be a controller connected to a game console, TASBot triggers glitches and exploits weaknesses to execute arbitrary opcodes and rewrite games. This talk will cover how these exploits were found and will explore the idea that breaking video games using Tool-Assisted emulators can be a fun way to learn the basics of discovering security vulnerabilities. An overview of some of the details that will be described in the talk can be found in an article I coauthored for the PoC||GTFO journal issue 0x10 (Pokemon Plays Twitch, page 6).

Have you looked at the prices of ChromeBooks and thought “Wow, that’s cheap! Too bad they don’t run my OS of choice.” Well, they can! In this talk, Robert will go over the options to give you “more” Linux with your ChromeOS device, from just accessing the crosh (chrome-os-shell) to flashing a new ROM with Coreboot and SeaBIOS and installing the Linux distro of your choice.

Come show us what you’ve been up to! Bring your projects, problems and persons for round-table discussion. We also welcome lightning talks if you’d like to present, but don’t have enough material for a full talk. A projector will be available (VGA).