[amsat-bb] Hack-a-Sat finals this weekend - AMSAT volunteers represented!

[Michelle Thompson]

Greetings all,

There's a major event happening this weekend with a very large amateur
radio satellite component.

It's DEFCON. This year it's virtual and free to attend!

https://www.defcon.org/

DEFCON draws 30,000 people interested in improving technology and
themselves.

In the past, amateur radio and AMSAT have been well represented, presented,
and promoted at WiFi Village, Ham Radio Village, and Hardware Hacking
Village. It's been a real pleasure to present amateur satellite work at
DEFCON because the audience is receptive, educated, interested, and
supportive. Every time we have a booth or talk, the feedback is
overwhelmingly positive.

The largest US amateur radio licensing session on record happened at DEFCON
a couple of years ago. Amateur radio is alive and well.

This year, a number of AMSAT members have participated in another aspect of
DEFCON: The competitions!

There are a lot of competitions at DEFCON. They range from silly to
extremely difficult multi-day technical ordeals.

This year, the Air Force sponsored a high-end competition called
Hack-a-Sat.

For the qualifying event, amateur radio satellite service enthusiasts were
recruited. Our practical knowledge and interdisciplinary can-do spirit was
something that I thought would provide a unique advantage in a competition
ordinarily dominated by networking and computing information security
professionals.

This strategy worked. An interdisciplinary team finished 20th out of over
1500. You can find reports about it in the -BB archive.

Unfortunately, while 20th place is a remarkable achievement, that meant
that team missed out on the finals, as only the top 10 moved on.

However, I have some news! A number of us hams were recruited by teams that
finished in the finals. There will be several AMSAT engineering volunteers
participating in the final event this weekend. I'm on ADDVulcan along with
several others.

We are very excited to represent amateur radio in an event put on by the
Air Force to explore current and pressing security issues with satellite
technology.

For the finals, the teams each received a flatsat. The challenges in the
competition are both "virtual", meaning code only, and also "real", meaning
having to do with the flatsat hardware.

If you want to follow along, there will be coverage and content at
https://www.hackasat.com/

Some inside baseball: The team that won the semifinals is a famous
engineering competition team called PPP. They have withdrawn from the
finals because they also have a team in the "main" computing CTF at DEFCON,
and could not field both teams at once.

ADDVulcan finished 4th, and has strengthened their position through
recruiting and practice.

So, I think it's fair to say that amateur radio satellite service people
have a chance to contribute to a possible win at an international elite
competition. Everyone here should be very proud of what our license and
hobby enables.

Some of the things we've had to learn with respect to tools are Core Flight
System (NASA open source) and COSMOS, from Ball Aerospace. We've also been
given an opportunity to see what the Air Force believes are the 1) current
capabilities of the technical community and 2) what the threat models might
be.

I look forward to sharing what we learn and how we do with all of you.

These are the sorts of things I think AMSAT should be supporting and
sponsoring. It's well within our capabilities as a community to host
competitions like this one, where the goal of the challenges is to produce
quality open source work that solves particular problems. If you are
interested in doing something like this, then I'm here to help make it
happen. Get in touch and let's see what we can come up with!

-Michelle W5NYV