Shmoocon was a little over a week ago but I wanted to wait until we got all the materials together before I wrote up this post. This year, like last year, White Wolf provided some hardware and bandwidth for the Hack or Halo Competition. The competition went amazingly well for all involved, both in pre-game setup and execution thanks to the awesome HoH crew that never fail to deliver amazing results.
Registration
For those that may participate in next year's competition, registration went extremely fast this year. Last year we filled all our available slots an hour or two before the competition (which is at the end of the 2nd day of the con). This year we had all spots filled and were into the waiting list by the end of the 1st day, which is absolutely incredible.
The Halo tournament has a hard limit on number of spaces based on XBox space and the amount of time we want the competition to run. So there are 64 spaces total for Halo, which gives a first tier of 8 games with 8 players. The competition was run this year with the top half of each round moving on to the next tier (so in Round 1 the top 4 players from that game moved on). Chris, Kymberlee and Mike ran everything extremely efficiently. 5 minute rounds, 2 minutes in between to set up the next round (which helps account fo the strange round times given).
The Hack tournament had a somewhat arbitrary limit of 40 players set, based on what we originally thought were network switch space limitations. It turned out we had a lot more space than initially planned for, so after a quick network reconfiguration and some debugging (Remember: if you run NMap as an unprivileged user it defaults to a TCP 3-way handshake, instead of an ICMP ECHO request. Always run your NMap scans as root.) we opened up to the competition to anybody who wanted to play.
Since we hadn't planned to accomodate that many people originally, the Hack space got a little crowded (sorry, guys), and really became an insane hazard of jumbled chairs and network cables strewn wherever there was room.
Competition
The actual competitions went very smoothly. Prizes this year were a netbook for the Halo winner and an XBox360 for the Hack winner (with the logic being, if you win the Halo competition you probably already have an XBox, and if you win the Hack competition you probably already have a laptop. QED). But as a special addition this year the resident HoH artist (Mike Goffin) customized both the netbook and the XBox with a Hack or Halo logo (Mike is also the guy that designs the posters each year, as well as the Hack or Halo tshirt and the stickers), which turned out absolutely awesome.
The Hack competition had a number of new puzzles this year, hopefully offering a little something for everyone. Everything from physical security (lock picking, social engineering) to web app security (XSS, CSRF) to Reverse Engineering was included for a total of 16 puzzles to try and complete in the 2 hours of the competition (the winning team finished 15, but couldn't quite get the last reverse engineering puzzle before time ran out).
The social engineering task (use a VoIP phone to call a "secretary" and convince her to let you in the door) turned out to be a hilarious task, slightly evocative of a Family Guy scene... Something about having Heise (a 6' tall guy with a mohawk) speaking in falsetto to imitate a secretary is simultaneously hilarious and wrong.
Associated Links
Thanks to the entire Hack or Halo crew for helping put everything together (Chris, Kymberlee, Mike, Heise, Fotios, Jordan, Wes and Gentoo), and especially thanks to all the participants for making HoH incredibly successful and fun. We'll try and re-think how we handle seating for all the participants next year, but if you have any other comments or suggestions for improvement please head over to the Hack or Halo blog and leave comments (or email one of the HoH crew).
- Pictures from Shmoocon (from Carson, the official con photographer)
- All the files from Hack or Halo (the VM that was running the puzzles, the clues and answers to the puzzles, and the introduction and background letters)
- The official Hack or Halo Blog
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