8 Hacks to Watch at Design West's Black Hat Summit

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Hacking has two hats—black and white—and you can try on both for size at Design West 2013.

[Click here to register for DESIGN West 2013, April 22-25 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. Options range from an All-Access Pass -- which includes Black Hat (security) Conference Session to Free Expo Admission].

The black hats have their own appeal, like an in-yer-face Quentin Tarantino flick, so let’s get right to them. Info for white hats about hacks they need to know about will surface at the Black Hat Embedded Security Summit. This is a key element of the reinvigorated DESIGN conference program.

The Black Hat Embedded Security Summit provides electronics professionals with essential information and tools, as well as a forum for the discussion and evaluation of the latest solutions for securing their embedded systems from threats in today's global environment. This year's event program will showcase training courses focused on topics such as Network Security, Incident Response, Web Application Security, and Exploit Development. Five black hacks captured my attention when I wandered through the program. My favorite is a session on hacking your car that might have caught my eye because I have a jammed door lock on my 2004 Honda CRV.

The session Vehicle Network on Tuesday, April 23 at 3:15pm has a decidedly more high tech focus than my mundane mechanical problems. It takes it for granted that today’s car is a network on wheels and goes about showing you how to perform—and prevent--a Denial of Service attack on it.

Presenter Robert Leale of CanBusHack Inc. will report on which cars he found easiest and hardest to hack. Might be worth the price of admission just to find out how your vehicle fared. As for my old buggy—even I can’t get into it!