To everybody's surprise, I got accepted at Black Hat USA 2024, to speak about Modern Anti-Abuse Mechanisms in Competitive Video Games. It has been a childhood dream of mine to speak there, so I'm quite happy to be able to finally cross it off my wishlist.
Las Vegas is a despicable place at best, and taking the plane is an exercise in multidimensional
fractal of self-hatred levels, thanks in no small part to the CBP (+1h30) and American
Airlines (+4h), but the conference was nothing but impressive. First of, it's huge, like
above CCC-level of huge, with more than 20.000 people attending in person. It's
also commercial, up to an impressive point: billboards
and ads full of buzzwords salad for big infosec companies are everywhere,
and the vendor floor has enough junk goodies to fill a
landfill. But some of them were really nice: it was great to see old friends
at Hex-Ray, Corellium's capabilities
are nothing but black magic, Chainguard was
surprisingly wholesome, have some conversation about the tor
network with Team Cymru and
Human, get some news at Fortra,
discuss why I couldn't recommend OffSec's
trainings anymore with them,
thank Synopsys/1Password/Thinkst Canary
for the free tier of their products,
discuss static analysis with some engineers at SemGrep
and dynamic one at Mayhem.
…
I even had some interesting job offers.
It was also a great opportunity to meet some acquaintances face-to-face,
and make new ones.
There was a mildly scary moment due to WiFi breaking on Asahi, but nothing that couldn't be fixed while laying on an airport floor between flights. Oh, and another one when Asahi Linux decided to not play nice with the external display, and again when OSX' Lockdown Mode broke Google Slides. Despite those hiccups, I think that my talk went pretty well, expect for my fumbled conclusion. You can get the slides here, or on Black Hat USA 2024 website, and view the talk here:
I had the invaluable help of Lukasz Gogolkiewicz via Black Hat's Speaker Coaching Program who played no small part into significantly cranking up the awesomeness of the talk; as well as friends who were voluntold to provide feedback. Moreover, giving a talk based on this small blogpost was cryptax' idea. Organisation-wise from the Black Hat side, everything has been top-notch and a real pleasure to deal with; even the (vegetarian) food was great!