It’s been a longtime feature of the annual Defcon hacker conference that attendees come away not only with knowledge of new software vulnerabilities and hacking techniques but also an elaborately designed conference badge—often electronic masterpieces embedded with intricate puzzles, complex crypto challenges, hidden Easter eggs, and even the mechanical gear trains of a watch.
Each year’s badge creator endeavors to top previous designs and blow the minds of hard-to-impress hackers. But this year’s badges take a different tack. Instead of the badge designs being the star, it’s what is inside the hardware that will really stand out.
This year, Defcon asked legendary hardware hacker Andrew “bunnie” Huang to create the badges—revealed here for the first time—and they include an innovative open source chip that Huang designed and that aims to do no less than advance the state of security, transparency, and trustworthiness in computing.
But the chip isn’t just part of the badge. Its core module can be removed and used after the conference as a hardware security token, giving the badge a second life beyond Defcon.
The chip—called the Baochip-1x—is a “mostly” open source microcontroller that has been three years in the making and fulfills Huang’s years-long dream of making a chip whose security is verifiable. Huang has published the source code for the Baochip’s operating system, firmware, processor core, cryptographic engines, and input-output system, on GitHub, making these components available for inspection and use.
The chip is also packaged so that researchers can peer inside to check the silicon itself and compare what they see against the published design, rather than having to trust that the manufactured chip is what the designers intended.