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Damien Cauquil & Romain Cayre at Hardwear Netherlands 2024

Damien Cauquil & Romain Cayre



One for all and all for WHAD: wireless shenanigans made easy!






Talk Title:

One for all and all for WHAD: wireless shenanigans made easy!

Abstract:

A lot of security research have recently focused on various wireless communication protocols, targeting smartphones, wireless mice and keyboards and even cars. In order to demonstrate these attacks, researchers developed dedicated tools that for most of them include some specialized firmware of their own but also rely on various unique custom host/device communication protocols. These tools work great but are strongly tied to some specific hardware that at some point will not be available anymore, or require hackers to buy more hardware to carry on to have fun with.


Why not making these tools compatible with more hardware ? And why researchers always have to create their own host/device protocol when it comes to using a dedicated hardware ? Why not having one flexible protocol and related tools to rule them all ?


We will present in this talk WHAD, a framework that provide an extensible host/device communication protocol, dedicated protocol stacks and way more for hackers who love having fun with wireless protocols. WHAD makes interoperability possible between tools by allowing different hardware devices to be used if they provide the required capabilities, giving the opportunity to create advanced tools without having to care about the hardware and its firmware in most of the cases!


Speaker Bio:

Damien Cauquil is security engineer at Quarkslab, France. He loves electronics, embedded devices, wireless protocols and to hack all of these not especially in that order. He authored several Bluetooth Low Energy tools like Btlejuice and Btlejack, discovered a way to hack into an existing Bluetooth Low Energy connection and other tools on a lot of different topics that tickle his mind but not always related to security or wireless protocols.