A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege to teach an SDR class at the Wild West Hackinfest in Deadwood, SD. We spent two days working through radio and SDR concepts from the ground up. As always, I kept the lecturing to a minimum and concentrated on a number of hands-on projects.
During the conference itself, I hosted a reverse engineering lab in the main convention floor. We used gnuradio to break down a simple fan controller signal and identify the functions of all its payload bits. We then assembled and transmitted our own control signal to take over the system. It was a simple device to reverse, but each of the steps we took was applicable to more complicated digital radios.
I was had a few copies of the Field Expedient SDR series for sale, but unfortunately not quite enough. If you stopped by my table too late to get a copy, you can still order copies in either paperback, Kindle or iBooks formats.
The conference itself was an amazing experience, with a host of awesome speakers and a ton of labs. The vibe was laid back and fun, and I’m grateful to Black Hills InfoSec and John Strand for letting me participate. If you have a chance to make it next year, I’d strongly recommend it.