So this weekend I’m driving to Nashville for the annual phreaknic conference. The leader of my church’s Geeks 4 Jesus ministry, Bryson, was invited to help administer the rootwar at the conference, and has managed to bring a few more of us along with him.

All of the presentations look interesting, but I’m especially looking forward to the ReactOS, AJAX, and vulnerability analysis presentations. We’re going to participate in the WIFI race as a team; with luck we can get back to the hotel quickly. Given the fact none of us have messed with wardriving, nor have we ever tried cantannae, etc., I have expectation we’ll do well at all, but it will be fun.

Traditional hacking methods (including social engineering) are allowed for the WIFI race. One of my coworkers suggested we engage in some misdirection. One of us could sit in a Starbucks somewhere in the game area with a laptop spoofing the target AP. Running a webserver with a dummy code and the cell phone of whoever is sitting there, and we could probably convince at least a few other teams to stop looking for the target by telling them they won, reducing competition for us Not sure we’re willing to stoop that low…

I’m expecting to learn quite a bit and hopefully meet a lot of interesting (and useful) people. We’ll see. If nothing else, it’s a 4-day road trip with some like-minded people

Only problem is security. I’m sure I’ll want to post and email from the presentations. I’m equally sure I don’t want to transmit any passwords over a wireless network while surrounded by 500 hackers. I expect the wireless will be encrypted, and we have a secure VPN set up at the church, and any site I visit will be SSL secured… none of which will make the slightest difference, methinks. Even if it would take a while to crack the layers of security, I’m sure at least a few people will be running wireless packet loggers the whole weekend, keeping everything they find for later perusal.

The perils of learning from the best, I suppose.