Over the years, I have been looking forward to seeing every new unofficial hardware badge from #Badgelife 强者AND!XOR. A mix of new and interesting components, alternative reality games and memes, you never know what they will throw away.
On Thursday, a bubble bag with the latest products landed on my desk. AND! XOR electronic badge for DEF CON 29, A mixed face-to-face and online meeting held this weekend. Although the previous year has been increasing the bet on complexity and making magic, it is not surprising that they have adopted different strategies considering the uncertainty of the global pandemic and global chip shortage. We have a badge hacker puzzle here, which challenges you just to figure out how to put things together!
hardware
Open the badge, it is obvious that this is a welding kit. In addition to the main PCB and four sub-PCBs, there is a small zipper assembly with tape, two button batteries, a battery holder and a beautiful colored lanyard. You have to put all these things in one package to ship, so the meme factory decided to launch a package of “Damonitos,” a recently adopted label mascot for the Doritos brand of corn flakes and badges. Matt Damon. I didn’t ask why, and you shouldn’t ask either.
The problem is that there is nothing programmable here. This is a hardware badge through and through. I will dive into the assembly details later, but this looks like surface mount resistors, capacitors and transistors, and a through-hole trimmer potentiometer. This is an ingenious way to avoid the problem of reliably procuring any number of microcontrollers in 2021.
The board itself is obviously processed by OSH Park’s “After Dark” (sure enough, their logo is on the back of the board). The iconic treatment uses a black substrate (the circuit board itself), a transparent solder mask to allow the copper traces to show through, ENIG electroplating of the gold pad, and a white solder mask.
Assemble the puzzle
I think AND! XOR is self-evident Best at recording their badges, But within the scope of the puzzle they designed. In this case, most people will reach out for the schematic and begin to assemble the board with glue. But go to their project page, you will find that no such resources are available.
What you will find is Encourage cracking of glyph passwords used as component references Beside each footprint on the back of the circuit board. There are 16 icons used in the key, which makes me think it is a good number in hexadecimal value, but I am just complaining. I don’t have time to start dealing with this challenge, but this is what I want to do now. Not suitable for the prospect of completing my actual work, Ha ha and! XOR.
The three-legged footprint is easy to figure out, but the two different transistor tapes make me think you need to establish PNP and NPN. Even if you solve this problem and crack the code for the resistance value, there is still a routing problem in progress.
The sub-PCB itself is an interesting part of the challenge. Each front has two faces, which are divided into two halves at the edge. The toothed edges on the tip and bottom match the footprint on the front of the main PCB. For some reason, this is reminiscent of a slot machine, where you want to match a similar image with every spin. On the back of the daughter board, you can see their respective electrical circuits traced to different destinations.
I was told that the size of the circuit board exactly matches the official CDC COVID vaccine card (I think this also explains the alcohol wipes and bandages that come with it). Other notable features include the use of 1980s style 8-bit rounded “rounded” edges. The square hole of the badge lanyard continues the beauty.
Although this has not risen to the same height as their DC27 badge, which includes phosphorescent stickers integrated with PCBs, light pipes for spatial effects, and clever use of dotted screens, we live in a very different The world started two years ago. After the earth-shaking changes in our lives, it is refreshing to see a new gameplay that is more easily accepted by ordinary people than the multiplayer games of previous years, which are limited to challenges. Even if you don’t have this kit on hand, you should be able to take the images I have included in this article, draw trace diagrams, and crack the code to find the circuit. I was fascinated.
AND!XOR combined 800 badge kits. So far, about 400 pieces have been sold through their online store. The rest will be distributed in person on DEF CON 29, and they will once again resume the practice of “local delivery” around the world. If you want one, and can tolerate—even embrace—a steady stream of memes, Follow their social In the next few days.