Sputnik
From 23C3 Public Wiki
CCC-Sputnik is the first public appearance of the Open Source Project OpenBeacon.org and every attendant of the 23C3 is warmly invited to take part in this realtime in-building location tracking system. The CCC-Sputnik project intends to demonstrate the actual possibilities and threats of tracking and data mining with the RFID technology.
The transmitting device is a small 36x36mm pcb, powered by a coin cell. A Nordic RF Chip and a PIC microcontroller are used to control the 2.4GHz RF communication and a red LED indicates the transmitting periods. The device also provides a touch sensor in the upper right corner for further interaction possibilities.
Function
There will be 1000 Sputnik devices available for the expected 3000 guests at the conference. Each device will transmit its unique id. The transmitted signals will be collected by up to 25 RFID base stations within the congress building and transferred to a centralized server via Ethernet.
Every tag has its serial number printed on the back side. This number can be connected to further information within a Wiki page. The owner of a tag has the possibility to add some personal data like name, status (speaker, angel, visitor, police) or inventory, which will be visible with the corresponding tag for all other attendants.
Hack value
In order to make this project attractive to hackers, the Sputnik hardware schematics and firmware source code will be published on the first day of the event, enabling hackers to enhance/replace the existing firmware, and to add new applications such as peer-to-peer communication between multiple Sputniki.
A server based software is evaluating and estimating the positions of each Sputnik based on its signal strength, occurrence and position of the receiving base station. There will be different transmission power levels to increase the accuracy of the position calculation. The data and a simple visualisation will be accessable via a IP address which will be announced at the first conference day. This means that everyone has access to all data. Feel free to improve the algorithm of position calculation and visualisation with your own ideas!
Availability
CCC-Sputnik can be purchased for 10EUR inside the 23C3 at the CCC-Sputnik table. There will also be a lecture about Sputnik on the first day in 'Saal 2' at 2:00 pm. We hope to see lots of you there and your tags on the screen!
Sideeffects
The alarm system of Galeria Kaufhof (near Alexanderplatz) is triggered by Sputnik :)
