Unlock the hidden secrets of the badge. What kind of secrets lie in waiting? Designed for security researchers and hardware enthusiasts, the BSidesTLV2025 badge is your ultimate mystery in digital exploration.

The BSidesTLV2025 badge is a hardware hacking challenge. It is suitable for both novice and experienced tinkerers and hackers. It utilizes a low number of components to make the challenge easier to grasp, but holds in itself enough intricacies that will require the challenger a keen eye and sharp mind to solve all challenges.

To solve the challenge you will need to discover a series of flags, hidden inside the badge. Each one will help you unlock the next step in the challenge, to finally reveal the ultimate secret the badge holds.

You, as the challenger, will face a couple of tricks on the hardware level. It is strongly recommended to identify which chips are used, find their datasheet and understand how they are connected. Then, dive into the software to understand how it is built and figure out what needs to be done to make the badge uncover its truth to you. All the software (except the encryption keys and the flags) is available here on this repository. It is recommended to try and reverse engineer the PCB before heading towards the hw folder.

• aes.cpp AES implementation
• main.cpp Boot and Setup

... The rest is up to you. :-)

Ultimately, no additional tools are required to solve the challenges. However, for hardcore external hacking, the following list is a recommended list of equipment that is suggested to solve the challenge:

• Multimeter
• Soldering Iron
• Jumper wires
• An external microcontroller (Any Arduino/RPi)

Please install the following software to be able to flash software to the device:

• ch32fun Follow install guide for toolchain and minichlink flash utility
• Flash Update Use online update tool to update the sword using preflashed bootloader

All PCB specs are provided here under hw/. This can be easily manufactured as well as paneled for a larger volume. There are no special requirements for this board's manufacturing process.

Distributed under the MIT License.

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Gili Yankovitch - @GiliYankovitch - [email protected]