Tagged: cyberspectrum

CyberSpectrum Special: DEF CON Wireless Village Talks now Live

Cyberspectrum #23 is now live and can be viewed via the YouTube live stream below. It should be available for delayed viewing after the event as well. The talks include SDR and radio related topics on subjects such as:

  • HAARP ionosphere research
  • An open source implementation of DVB-S2 and DVB-S2X for both satellite and terrestrial amateur radio use
  • An open source SpyServer based tool for automatically demodulating/recording and parsing RF data
  • Reverse engineering X-Band satellites
  • An RTL-SDR powered web based trunking scanner with timeshifting capabilities.
Cyberspectrum Special: DEF CON Wireless Village

Since out last post previewing the event, some new talks have been added, and we've posted the line up and info below.

At this years DEFCON conference SDR evangelist Balint Seeber will be hosting Cyberspectrum #23. DEFCON is a yearly conference with a focus on hacker topics, which often include SDRs and other radio topics too. This years conference will be help on August 9 - 12 a Caesars Palace & Flamingo in Las Vegas. Cyberspectrum is an almost monthly meetup of SDR enthusiasts and researchers that is normally held in the San Francisco Bay Area, but often hosts remote speakers via teleconference. This months meetup will be held at DEFCON on August 9, hosted by the Wireless Village.

Chris Fallen, Ph.D. (@ctfallen): "Opportunities for radio enthusiasts and heaters of the ionosphere: HAARP is just another instrument, or is it?"

Preview of a future #cyberspectrum talk: Background of passive and active ways to get involved with HAARP experiments (and perhaps with other natural natural ionosphere events) based on prior and ongoing work.

Michelle Thompson (@abraxas3d): "ORI and Phase 4 Ground" (https://phase4ground.github.io/)

Open Research Institute (ORI) is a new non-profit research and development organization which provides all of its work to the general public under the principles of Open Source and Open Access to Research.

One of our projects is called Phase 4 Ground. Our mission is to provide an open source implementation of DVB-S2 and DVB-S2X for both satellite and terrestrial amateur radio use. Phase 4 Ground radio system has a 5GHz uplink and a 10GHz downlink. We are developing SDR software that heavily leverages IP multicast and RTP protocols to set up and tear down distributed remote radio functions.

The reference designs are in GNU Radio and we will provide recipes for as many SDRs as possible.

Phase 4 Ground radios are intended to be reusable and reconfigurable, supporting payloads at GEO (AMSAT Phase 4B), HEO (AMSAT Phase 3E), and beyond (such as NASA's Cube Quest Challenge). Additionally, our radios will work as terrestrial microwave stations. These 'Groundsats' on mountaintops or towers establish a fun and flexible digital microwave experience. If you want to build up your radio from SDRs, you can. If you want to build it entirely from scratch, then you can. Our manufacturing partner for an off-the-shelf design is Flex Radio.

Lucas Teske (@lucasteske): SegDSP SpyServer Segment Digital Signal Processor

SegDSP is a WIP "Segment Digital Signal Processor" that is tuned for connecting into a SPY Server and do automatically demodulation/recording/parsing of RF data. This talk will be about what it does today, how was the development, how it works, how it will work and what are the uses for it. Tired of losing the pass of a LEO satellite? Want to hear the recording from last week? SegDSP is a Open Source tool made in Go for both learning and monitoring Satcom and Terrestrial Com.

Luigi Freitas (@luigifcruz): "Reverse Engineering X-Band Satellites Datalink And The Worst Software Defined Radio Ever"

This talk will be about the reverse engineering process of the next generation X-Band datalink signal on-board of Sun Synchronous Satellites like Suomi (NPP) and NOAA-20 (NPOESS/JPSS-1). From the RAW I/Q recording to the decompressed high-resolution Earth pictures. This is the latest addition to the Open Satellite Project, a non-profit organization that is committed to develop and publish software tools and hardware projects that enable the Open-Source Community to access spacecraft non-sensitive data.

The other half (or so) of this talk will be about the “Worst SDR Ever” that is made entirely of dirty cheap parts readily available from China. This project is intended to demonstrate how a Software Defined Radio works utilizing real hardware and comprehensive modular software.

Gavin Rozzi (@gavroz): "OC Radio Live" (https://ocradio.live)

An online trunking scanner website with time shifting capabilities covering New Jersey powered by the RTLSDR and open source software.

Upcoming DEFCON Cyberspectrum Wireless Village SDR Talks

At this years DEFCON conference SDR evangelist Balint Seeber will be hosting Cyberspectrum #23. DEFCON is a yearly conference with a focus on hacker topics, which often include SDRs and other radio topics too. This years conference will be help on August 9 - 12 a Caesars Palace & Flamingo in Las Vegas. Cyberspectrum is an almost monthly meetup of SDR enthusiasts and researchers that is normally held in the San Francisco Bay Area, but often hosts remote speakers via teleconference. This months meetup will be held at DEFCON on August 9, hosted by the Wireless Village.

The planned talk overviews are listed below, and Balint would like to note that any physical attendees are welcome to get in contact with him and submit more talks. Previous Cyberspectrum talks can be viewed on this YouTube playlist.

Michelle Thompson (@abraxas3d): "ORI and Phase 4 Ground" (https://phase4ground.github.io/)

Open Research Institute (ORI) is a new non-profit research and development organization which provides all of its work to the general public under the principles of Open Source and Open Access to Research.

One of our projects is called Phase 4 Ground. Our mission is to provide an open source implementation of DVB-S2 and DVB-S2X for both satellite and terrestrial amateur radio use. Phase 4 Ground radio system has a 5GHz uplink and a 10GHz downlink. We are developing SDR software that heavily leverages IP multicast and RTP protocols to set up and tear down distributed remote radio functions.

The reference designs are in GNU Radio and we will provide recipes for as many SDRs as possible.

Phase 4 Ground radios are intended to be reusable and reconfigurable, supporting payloads at GEO (AMSAT Phase 4B), HEO (AMSAT Phase 3E), and beyond (such as NASA's Cube Quest Challenge). Additionally, our radios will work as terrestrial microwave stations. These 'Groundsats' on mountaintops or towers establish a fun and flexible digital microwave experience. If you want to build up your radio from SDRs, you can. If you want to build it entirely from scratch, then you can. Our manufacturing partner for an off-the-shelf design is Flex Radio.

Lucas Teske (@lucasteske): SegDSP SpyServer Segment Digital Signal Processor

SegDSP is a WIP "Segment Digital Signal Processor" that is tuned for connecting into a SPY Server and do automatically demodulation/recording/parsing of RF data. This talk will be about what it does today, how was the development, how it works, how it will work and what are the uses for it. Tired of losing the pass of a LEO satellite? Want to hear the recording from last week? SegDSP is a Open Source tool made in Go for both learning and monitoring Satcom and Terrestrial Com.

Luigi Freitas (@luigifcruz): "Reverse Engineering X-Band Satellites Datalink And The Worst Software Defined Radio Ever"

This talk will be about the reverse engineering process of the next generation X-Band datalink signal on-board of Sun Synchronous Satellites like Suomi (NPP) and NOAA-20 (NPOESS/JPSS-1). From the RAW I/Q recording to the decompressed high-resolution Earth pictures. This is the latest addition to the Open Satellite Project, a non-profit organization that is committed to develop and publish software tools and hardware projects that enable the Open-Source Community to access spacecraft non-sensitive data.

The other half (or so) of this talk will be about the “Worst SDR Ever” that is made entirely of dirty cheap parts readily available from China. This project is intended to demonstrate how a Software Defined Radio works utilizing real hardware and comprehensive modular software.

Gavin Rozzi (@gavroz): "OC Radio Live" (https://ocradio.live)

An online trunking scanner website with time shifting capabilities covering New Jersey powered by the RTLSDR and open source software.

GNURadioCon17 CyberSpectrum Special Meetup Now Live

Live right now is CyberSpectrum #22, currently being held at the GNU Radio Convention in San Diego. Cyberspectrum is an often monthly meetup where SDR enthusiasts come from around the world to share their work. The video will be available offline once the stream is over too. But if watched live you can use the #cyberspectrum hashtag on Twitter, or join the #cyberspectrum on Freenode IRC to discuss the presentations live.

Cyberspectrum Special: GNU Radio (San Diego)

Speakers include:

• The Phil Karn (@ka9q) 

Low-cost general coverage/HAM receiver for Raspberry Pi & FUNcube dongle, or other cheap SDR.

• Clayton Smith (@argilo) 

By day, Clayton is a security researcher at ecommerce company Shopify, and by night a GNU Radio enthusiast and amateur radio operator (VE3IRR). He’s worked on projects such as gr-dsd (digital voice), gr-qam (digital television), gr-elster (utility metering), gr-rds (radio data) and sdr-examples. Tonight he’ll tell you about his recent work on HD Radio. 

• Josh Blum (@pothosware) 

Interesting features in Pothos framework, how we pull in GNU Radio project, and proposed additions to the GNU Radio project. 

• Alexander Chemeris (@chemeris) 

The first public demo of XTRX – a tiny high-performance miniPCIe SDR for the real world. Up to 120MSPS for simultaneous 2×2 MIMO receive/transmit. 

Las Vegas CyberSpectrum: Streaming Live August 4

Every month SDR evangelist Balint Seeber hosts the Cyberspectrum Meetup in San Francisco, where many SDR fans come together to listen to various presentations. This months meetup is a special event that will be held in Las Vegas during the week of the big DEFCON and Black Hat conferences which are also being held in Las Vegas.

The talks will be presented at the SYN Shop Hackerspace in Las Vegas, and will also be live streamed via YouTube as usual (probably on balints YouTube Channel). The meetup begins on Thursday, August 4, 2016 at 6:30 PM Las Vegas time.

This month the talks include:

• “SlackRadio: Turning your Slack channel into a radio station” with Nate Temple

Slack is a popular real-time messaging system designed for team use. I will demo a small application built with GNU Radio and the Slack API that turns your Slack channel into a real radio station for your office.

slack_radio

• “Pothosware” with Josh Blum

Pothosware: An open-source software stack for the SDR community including the Pothos framework for creating interconnected topologies of processing blocks, Pothos GUI for graphical designing, controlling, and visualizing topologies, and SoapySDR – a SDR abstraction layer. The talk will present and overview of the software, cover the inner workings of the framework, and demonstrations with the GUI.

pothosware

• FPGA-based ADS-B SDR Receiver with Brian Padalino

Brian will discuss the design and implementation of an ADS-B receiver in the FPGA over the BladeRF.

bladerf_adsp_fpga

BIOS

Nate Temple:

I am software engineer, SDR Enthusiast, Maker and Amateur Radio operator. I previous presented the “Etch-a-SDR” at Cybserspectrum #11.

Josh Blum:

Josh has been crafting open source tools for the SDR community for over 10 years, starting with the GNU Radio companion back in 2006. He has been heavily involved in USRP FPGA and driver development, and now operates as an independent contractor.

Brian Padalino:

Brian has 11 years of experience working on signal processing in FPGA’s and has implemented multiple modems for real time performance. He is also the co-founder of Nuand and helped create the bladeRF.

Live Right Now: Cyberspectrum 17 Software Defined Radio Meetup

Every month SDR evangelist Balint Seeber hosts the Cyberspectrum Meetup in San Francisco, where many SDR fans come together to listen to various presentations. This months meetup is live right now (at the time of this post) and you can watch it live now on YouTube, or delayed later now over, but the recorded stream is available for viewing on YouTube. If you are in San Francisco you can attend the live meetup, but if not you can watch the live stream on YouTube.

This time the talks include:

•”The Land Mobile Radio Spectrum: What is out there, how it works, and how you can hear it” with Desmond Crisis (@dcrisis)

Wireless two-way is the technology that keeps the world working in sync. I’ll explore the various public safety, private enterprise, and personal communications services from[masked] MHz.  We’ll discuss the occupied spectrum, modulation bandwidths, trunked radio schemes and digital transmission modes currently in use on the band as well as what lies ahead. Bring your SDR kit and play along!

lmrs

• An Academic Look at Interference & Jamming

• Installfest / Hackfest / Debugfest

Cyberspectrum #16: Software Defined Radio Meetup

Every month SDR evangelist Balint Seeber hosts the Cyberspectrum Meetup in San Francisco, where many SDR fans come together to listen to various presentations. This months meetup is due to be held on June 29 at 7 PM (San Fran time, about 18 hours from the time of this post). If you are in San Francisco you can attend the live meetup, but if not you can watch the live stream on YouTube.

This time the talks include:

• “Understanding the LTE Physical Layer” with Sandor Szilvasi (@sszilvasi)

LTE is an incredible, yet complex, cellular networking standard. Sandor will break it down and explain how a LTE signal is constructed. He will also live demo the demodulation and decoding of local carriers.

LTE_cyberspectrum

• “Interactive Install & Setup-fest” with the group

We would like to open up the forum to those who wish to get set up with SDR (hardware and/or software). Bring along your equipment, and as a group we can look at/debug the steps required to get you up and running. This could also include setting up an app, or fixing an Out-Of-Tree module, or even an environment issue on your laptop.

• “GNU Radio Tutorial Part 2” with Neel Pandeya

The tutorial series will continue! This time we will look at how to construct an FM radio receiver, and decode the RDS digital subcarrier. This will include:

• Explain concepts behind commercial FM and RDS
• Receiving mono FM using a from-scratch flowgraph
• Showing how to build ‘gr-rds’
• Demonstrate stereo FM+RDS reception using ‘gr-rds’
• Building GQRX
• Demonstrate FM reception using GQRX

Live Right Now: The 12th Cyberspectrum Software Defined Radio Meetup

Cyberspectrum is a monthly software defined radio meetup that is held in San Francisco. During this meetup presenters show and discuss their SDR related work. The 12th Cyberspectrum meetup is occurring right now and this time there will be presentations from amateur radio astronomer Marcus Leech from Canada and wireless security researcher Tobias Zillner from Austria.

There is a live stream on YouTube shown below, and after it finishes it will also be available for viewing:

Edit: Stream is over. Marcus Leech gave a nice talk that gave an overview or amateur radio astronomy and explained some of his set up where he uses RTL-SDR dongles as the receiver.

Cyberspectrum: Bay Area Software Defined Radio #12 (Dec 2015)

The overview of today’s presentations are as follows:

• Marcus Leech from SBRAC: “An integrated proof-of-concept ‘all-digital’ feed for 21cm radio astronomy”

We show ongoing work in designing and building a proof-of-concept ‘all digital’ feed for 21cm radio astronomy experiments. While many professional radio astronomy observatories are using “digitize at the feed” techniques, amateur experiments (and successes) in this are very close to non-existent.

Digitizing at the feed carries many advantages, including overall system gain stability, and the ability to carry signals over cheap ethernet-over-fiber links.

We’ll show an example feed arrangement that uses a differential radiometry approach, and does much of the initial processing right at the feed, including radiometry and spectral calculations, sending summary data to an ordinary PC host over ethernet.

Challenges and pitfalls will be discussed.

• Tobias Zillner from Cognosec: “ZigBee Smart Homes – A Hacker’s Open House”

ZigBee is one of the most widespread communication standards used in the Internet of Things and especially in the area of smart homes. If you have for example a smart light bulb at home, the chance is very high that you are actually using ZigBee by yourself. Popular lighting applications such as Philips Hue or Osram Lightify and also popular smart home systems such as SmartThings or Googles OnHub are based on ZigBee. New IoT devices have often very limited processing and energy resources. Therefore they are not capable of implementing well-known communication standards like Wifi. ZigBee is an open, public available alternative that enables wireless communication for such limited devices.

ZigBee provides also security services for key establishment, key transport, frame protection and device management that are based on established cryptographic algorithms. So a ZigBee home automation network with applied security is secure and the smart home communication is protected?

No, definitely not. Due to “requirements” on interoperability and compatibility as well as the application of ancient security concepts it is possible to compromise ZigBee networks and take over control of all included devices. For example it is easily possible for an external to get control over every smart light bulb that supports the ZigBee Light Link profile. Also the initial key transport is done in an unsecured way. It is even required by the standard to support this weak key transport. On top of that another vulnerability allows third parties to request secret key material without any authentication and therefore takeover the whole network as well as all connected ZigBee devices. Together with shortfalls and limitations in the security caused by the manufacturers itself the risk to this last tier communication standard can be considered as highly critical.

This talk will provide an overview about the actual applied security measures in ZigBee, highlight the included weaknesses and show also practical exploitations of actual product vulnerabilities. Therefore new features in the ZigBee security testing tool SecBee will be demonstrated and made public available.