Caleb Davis & Nathan Smith

This year we created our first DEF CON badge and enjoyed almost every second of it. In this presentation we hope to enable other security professionals to tinker with badge development and give them tools and tricks to help facilitate their creativity. We think that understanding the process to create a working thing helps us all better understand where we can do things more securely and how to break things better. We will review the boring and unavoidable design questions that must be addressed, the exhilarating process of creating something that works well, and scaling up from a working prototype. We will demonstrate using real steps we took this year to make our badge for the Biohacking Village.  

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Caleb Davis leads Protiviti’s IoT/Embedded security team. Caleb operates out of the Dallas/Fort Worth area and has a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Tyler. He is an inventor/patent holder and has a background in embedded hardware/software development. He leads a team of experts that regularly perform penetration testing across a wide variety of products including medical devices, ATMs, chemical control systems, security solutions, and other commercial products. Additionally, Caleb has a passion for integrating security into the product development life cycle and has helped several organizations in their approach to shifting left.

 

Nathan Smith is a Manager focused on IoT device security at the Dallas Protiviti office. Before coming to Protiviti, Nathan accumulated 8 years of industry experience developing and testing embedded controls and software, leading software development teams, and managing digital products. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Tyler. He has performed device penetration testing, firmware reviews, and mobile application security assessments on industry devices. 

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