Mona
In this talk, I will describe how my team and I systematically exploited around a dozen home-rolled network encryption protocols used by popular mobile apps like RedNote, Alipay, and some of the most popular mobile browsers in China to encrypt sensitive information. I'll demonstrate how network eavesdroppers could access users' browsing history and mobile activity. This is a systemic issue; despite our work on the above protocols and the resulting vulnerability disclosures, this plague of home-rolled and proprietary encryption is still at large. I will end by discussing how we got here, re-affirm the age-old adage, “Don’t roll your own crypto!”, and call on hackers around the world to help us move towards HTTPS everywhere.
Shipei Qu, Zikai Xu, Xuangan Xiao
We present a comprehensive security assessment of Unitree's robotic ecosystem. We identified and exploited multiple security flaws across multiple communication channels, including Bluetooth, LoRa radio, WebRTC, and cloud management services. Besides pwning multiple traditional binary or web vulnerabilities, we also exploit the embodied AI agent in the robots, performing prompt injection and achieve root-level remote code execution. Furthermore, we leverage a flaw in cloud management services to take over any Unitree G1 robot connected to the Internet. By deobfuscating and patching the customized, VM-based obfuscated binaries, we successfully unlocked forbidden robotic movements restricted by the vendor firmware on consumer models such as the G1 AIR. We hope our findings could offer a roadmap for manufacturers to strengthen robotic designs, while arming researchers and consumers with critical knowledge to assess security in next-generation robotic systems.
Cory Doctorow
Trump has staged an unscheduled, midair rapid disassembly of the global system of trade. Ironically, it is this system that prevented all of America's trading partners from disenshittifying their internet: the US trade representative threatened the world with tariffs unless they passed laws that criminalized reverse-engineering and modding. By banning "adversarial interoperability," America handcuffed the world's technologists, banning them from creating the mods, hacks, alt clients, scrapers, and other tools needed to liberate their neighbours from the enshittificatory predations of the ketamine-addled zuckermuskian tyrants of US Big Tech. Well, when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. The Trump tariffs are here, and it's time to pick the locks on the those handcuffs and set the world's hackers loose on Big Tech. Happy Liberation Day, everyone!
Max, Julian
In this talk, we will give an introduction into the project (i.e. how it all started at 38c3 and why we are here now), provide an in-depth review of how the development process of our pager worked and what our future goals are. In our introduction, we will talk about the origin and exploration phase of the inital pager idea (i.e. how we went from the idea of bringing POCSAG Pager transmitter to 38c3, over a cable-bound prototype, to a first working pager on a proper PCB). We will also present our plans of connecting our POCSAG transmitter infrastructure to THOT (CERTs own dispatch software). For our in-depth review about the project, we explain how we encountered major reception problems, how we analyzed them at easterhegg22 and conducted experiments there, and why we are opting for a custom HF frontend design instead of an already-made one from chinese vendors. Moreover, we provide an overview of our transmitter devices and give some advice on how to replicate those. Lastly, we will discuss further challenges and what our next goals are. If we are reaching our milestone until 39c3, we will also give a live demo of the system.
Henri Jäger
This talk presents Apple's link-layer protocol Low-Latency WiFi and how it achieves its real-time capabilities to enable Continuity features like Sidecar Display and Continuity Camera. We make more kernel logging available on iOS and build a log aggregator that combines and aligns system- and network-level log sources from iOS and macOS.
Augustin Bielefeld, Alexander Willer
Why is electronics manufacturing hard? Can it ever be made easy and more accessible? What will it take to relocate industrial production to Europe? We share with you what we learned when we spent more than 1 year setting up our own production line in our office in Hamburg. Turns out a lot of the difficulties are rarely talked about or hidden behind "manufacturing is high CAPEX". Come and learn with us the nitty gritty details of batch reflow ovens, stencil printing at scale, and how OpenPnP is a key enabler in our process. While we are far from done with this work, we hope to see others replicate it and collectively reclaim the ownership of the means of electronics production.
Christiane Mudra
"freiheit.exe“ ist eine Lecture über die ideologischen Rootkits des Silicon Valley. Sie schlägt den Bogen von den italienischen Futuristen zu den heutigen Tech-Feudalisten, vom Akzelerationismus zur Demokratieskepsis der Libertären, von Tolkien zur PayPal-Mafia. Basierend auf den Recherchen zu meinem Theaterstück "freiheit.exe. Utopien als Malware", in dem journalistische Analyse auf performative Darstellung trifft.
Tim Philipp Schäfers (TPS)
Was passiert, wenn staatliche Domains auslaufen - und plötzlich jemand anderes sie besitzt? In diesem Vortrag wird berichtet, wie mehrere ehemals offizielle, aber unregistrierte Domains deutscher Bundesministerien und Behörden erworben werden konnten - und welche Datenströme dadurch sichtbar wurden. Über Monate hinweg konnten so DNS-Anfragen aus Netzen des Bundes empfangen werden - ein erhebliches Sicherheitsrisiko. Unter anderem da es so möglich war Accounts zu übernehmen, Validierungen von E-Mailsignaturen zu manipulieren, Anfrage umzuleiten und im Extremfall Code auf Systemen auszuführen. (Keine sensiblen Daten werden veröffentlicht; der Fokus liegt auf Forschung, Aufklärung und verantwortungsvollem Umgang mit den Ergebnissen.)
Nadia Heninger, Annie Dai
We pointed a commercial-off-the-shelf satellite dish at the sky and examined all of the geostationary satellite communications visible from our vantage point. A shockingly large amount of sensitive traffic is being broadcast unencrypted, including critical infrastructure, internal corporate and government communications, private citizens’ voice calls and SMS, and consumer Internet traffic from in-flight wifi and mobile networks.
bunnie, Sean "xobs" Cross
Xous is a message-passing microkernel implemented in pure Rust, targeting secure embedded applications. This talk covers three novel aspects of the OS: hardware MMU support (and why we had to make our own chip to get this feature), how and why we implemented the Rust standard library in Rust (instead of calling the C standard library, like most other Rust platforms), and how we combine the power of Rust semantics with virtual memory to create safe yet efficient asynchronous messaging primitives. We conclude with a short demo of the OS running on a new chip, the "Baochip-1x", which is an affordable, mostly-open RTL SoC built in 22nm TSMC, configured expressly for running Xous.
bleeptrack
Join bleeptrack for a deep dive into the fascinating world of procedural generation beyond the screen. From stickers and paper lanterns to PCBs, furniture, and even physical procedural generators, this talk explores the challenges and creative possibilities of bringing generative projects into tangible form.
Benny, KI-lian, BratscherBen
KIs (bzw. LLMs) wirken immer menschlicher. Schon längst ist es schwer bis unmöglich zu erkennen, ob ein Text von einer KI oder einem Menschen geschrieben wurde. Maschinen dringen immer mehr in den menschlichen Diskurs ein. Wir wollen das nicht länger hinnehmen und drehen den Spieß um.
Mustafa Mahmoud Yousif
The session title is fashioned after the Kenyan movement building rhetoric “Hatupangwingwi” which is Kenyan slang meant as a call to action to counter anti-movement building techniques by the political class and resist infiltration and corruption. This is true for the organisation and movement building towards inclusive identity regimes in Kenya. The session seeks to explore the lessons from Kenya’s journey to digitalization of public services and the uptake of Digital Public infrastructure. It digs deeper on the power of us and how civil society could stop a destructive surveillance driven digitalisation thus protecting millions of Kenyans.
Lori Roussey, Celia/Irídia
In 2022, CitizenLab contacted a member of the Spanish non-profit Irídia to tell them that one of their members had likely been hacked with Pegasus spyware. The target, a lawyer, had been spied on by the Spanish government in 2020 because he represented a Catalan politician who was in prison. His phone was infected with Pegasus during the COVID-19 lockdown, on the same day he was having an online meeting with other lawyers working on the case. Irídia and the lawyer (Andreu) decided to take the case to court. A few years later, he met with Data Rights and invited them to join forces and bring in partners from across Europe to increase the impact. This collaboration led to the creation of the PEGA coalition in May 2025. This talk goes over the status of the case and work we have done across Europe to bring spyware use in court.
tomate, jinxx
*Der deutsche Buchmarkt gegen den Rest der Welt oder auch: Enshittification des Buchmarkts und keine API für ein Halleluja* Es gibt unzählige wundervolle Geschichten und das Internet hat über die letzten Jahrzehnte viele großartige Autor*innen hervorgbracht. Doch Verlage haben begrenzte Kapazitäten und sind außerdem zumeist sehr konservativ in ihren Programmen. Die Lösung für beides: Selfpublishing. Neue und gewitzte, genre-übergreifende Bücher an neugierige Lesende zu bringen, könnte so einfach sein; wären da nicht Barsortimente, fehlende APIs und ein insgesamt schreckliches Ökosystem, die Indie-Autor:innen (und alle, die versuchen, auf dem deutschpsprachigen Buchmarkt irgend etwas Innovatives für Indies zu machen) das Leben schwer machen.
Philo
What does knitting have to do with espionage? Can embroidery help your mental health? This talk shows how the skills to create textile art have enabled people to resist and to persist under oppressive regimes for centuries. And it offers ways to keep doing so.
Leonard
The character of drone wars has changed. The large, cumbersome long-range drones have been complemented with small and low-budget drones. Moreover, more and more states are developing, deploying and selling them. Ten years ago at least 50 states were developing them. At the top are USA, Israel, Turkey, China, Iran and Russia. Russia's attack on Ukraine has unleashed a drone war unlike any seen before. In short time the Ukraine has build significant drone production capabilities and announcement that it will increase its own production of quadcopters and kamikaze drones to one million units per year. German defense companies and startups are now promoting a “drone wall on NATO's eastern flank.” Moreover, despite their vulnerability to air defenses, large drones are also being further developed. They are intended to accompany next generation fighter jets in swarms. In this talk, past and current developments are discussed. What are the perspectives now?
PhD (Philipp)
Factorio ist ein Fabriksimulationsspiel mit integriertem Logiksystem. Dies ermöglichte mir den Bau einer CPU, die unter anderem aus einer 5-stufiger Pipeline, einer Forwarding Logikeinheit, Interrupt Handling sowie einem I/O Interface besteht. Über einen selbst geschriebenen Assembler konnte ich ein eigenes Betriebssystem und Programme wie Minesweeper oder Snake integrieren. Der Talk soll euch zeigen, wie sich klassische Computerarchitektur in einem völlig anderen technischen Kontext umsetzen lässt und wo dabei überraschend echte Probleme der CPU-Entwicklung auftreten. Kommt mit auf die Reise: Vom Blick auf den gesamten Computer bis hinunter zu den einzelnen Logikgattern ist es nur eine Mausradbewegung entfernt!
Lyra Rebane
CSS is a programming language, and you can make games in it. Let's install NoScript and make some together!
octoprog
Textiles are everywhere, yet few of us know how they’re made. This talk aims to give you an overview over the complete transformation from fiber to finished textile. We'll be exploring fiber properties, spinning, and techniques like weaving, knitting, crochet, braiding, and knotting, followed by finishing methods such as dyeing, printing, and embroidery. You’ll learn why not only fiber but also structure matters, and how to make or hack textiles on your own without relying on fast fashion or industrial tools.
Ting-Chun Liu, Leon-Etienne Kühr
Generative AI models don't operate on human languages – they speak in **tokens**. Tokens are computational fragments that deconstruct language into subword units, stored in large dictionaries. These tokens encode not only language but also political ideologies, corporate interests, and cultural biases even before model training begins. Social media handles like *realdonaldtrump*, brand names like *louisvuitton*, or even *!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!* exist as single tokens, while other words remain fragmented. Through various artistic and adversarial experiments, we demonstrate that tokenization is a political act that determines what can be represented and how images become computable through language.
willem
The TitanM2 chip has been central to the security of the google pixel series since the Pixel 6. It is based on a modified RISC-V design with a bignum accelerator. Google added some non standard instructions to the RISC-V ISA. This talk investigates the reverse engineering using Ghidra, and simulation of the firmware in python.
Johann Rehberger
This talk demonstrates end-to-end prompt injection exploits that compromise agentic systems. Specifically, we will discuss exploits that target computer-use and coding agents, such as Anthropic's Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Google Jules, Devin AI, ChatGPT Operator, Amazon Q, AWS Kiro, and others. Exploits will impact confidentiality, system integrity, and the future of AI-driven automation, including remote code execution, exfiltration of sensitive information such as access tokens, and even joining Agents to traditional command and control infrastructure. Which are known as "ZombAIs", a term first coined by the presenter as well as long-term prompt injection persistence in AI coding agents. Additionally, we will explore how nation state TTPs such as ClickFix apply to Computer-Use systems and how they can trick AI systems and lead to full system compromise (AI ClickFix). Finally, we will cover current mitigation strategies and forward-looking recommendations and strategic thoughts.
Klaus Landefeld
Both within the EU as well as nationally in Germany, there exists a renewed drive to implement data retention, a practice struck down by the ECJ and discontinued in many national legislations. In parallel, cross-border access to stored data has been mandated within the EU as “e-evidence”, and will soon be extended to 90+ countries under the umbrella of the EU cybercrime convention. In principle, all data stored by service providers will be available to law enforcement as part of a criminal investigation. The timing of both initiatives is not coincidental, as access to data naturally relies on the availability of data. The talk will address the state of play on data retention in various legislations, and introduce the practice of cross border access to stored data by law enforcement as well as its shortcomings and threats to privacy and confidentiality.
akira25, flx, Gato
Wir geben Einblicke in zwei intensive Wochen Planung, Koordination und Aufbau, den Betrieb einer (improvisierten) Bodenstation, sprechen über technische Hürden, Antennendesign und Organisation – und wie wir schließlich mit Astronautin Rabea Rogge im Weltraum gefunkt haben.
Jan Pleskac
The talk will be about our experience from building an open-architecture secure element from the ground up. It explains why openness became part of the security model, how it reshaped design and development workflows, and where reality pushed back — through legal constraints, third-party IP, or export controls. It walks through the secure boot chain, attestation model, firmware update flow, integration APIs, and the testing framework built for external inspection. Real examples of security evaluations by independent researchers are presented, showing what was learned from their findings and how those exchanges raised the overall security bar. The goal is to provoke discussion on how open collaboration can make hardware more verifiable, adaptable, auditable and while keeping secure.
Bernd
A brief history of typographic misbehavior or intended and unintended uses of variable fonts. Nine years after the introduction of variable fonts, their most exciting uses have little to do with what variable fonts originally were intended for and their original promise of smaller file sizes. The talk looks at how designers turned a pragmatic font format into a field for experimentation — from animated typography and uniwidth button text to pattern fonts and typographic side effects with unintended aesthetics. Using examples from projects such as TypoLabs, Marjoree, Kario (the variable font that’s used as part of the 39C3 visual identity), and Bronco, we’ll explore how variable fonts evolved from efficiency tools into creative systems — and why the most interesting ideas often emerge when technology is used in unintended ways.
Markus (fin) Hametner, Erwin Ernst "eest9" Steinhammer
Jahrelang war die staatliche Intransparenz in Österreich nur eine Punchline in den Congress-Talks von Frag Den Staat. Damit könnte jetzt Schluss sein: seit heuer haben Bürger:innen endlich ein Recht, Dokumente einzusehen und ein Informationsfreiheitsgesetz. Wir zeigen, was Deutschland aus der über ein Jahrzehnt andauernden Kampagne für die Abschaffung des Amtsgeheimnisses lernen kann, wofür uns die Nachbarländer beneiden werden und wofür sich Bayern besonders schämen sollte.
breakingbread
This talk explores the internals of Overwatch which make the game work under the hood. The end goal is to democratise development of Overwatch. Being able to host your own servers and modify the game client to your liking should not be up for discussion for a game many people have paid money for.
Axel Böttcher
Der Vortrag beschreibt, wie eine Gruppe von Begeisterten eine Sammlung von ca. 100 Flipperautomaten (Pinball Machines) am Leben und in spielbereitem Zustand erhält.
Jade
"Don't roll your own crypto" is an often-repeated aphorism. It's good advice -- but then how does any cryptography get made? Writers of cryptography code like myself write code with bugs just like anyone else, so how do we take precautions against our own mistakes? In this talk, I will give a peek into the cryptographer's toolbox of advanced techniques to avoid bugs: targeted testing, model checking, mathematical proof assistants, information-flow analysis, and more. None of these techniques is a magic silver bullet, but they can help find flaws in reasoning about tricky corner cases in low-level code or prove that higher-level designs are sound, given a defined set of assumptions. We'll go over some examples and try to give a high-level feel for different workflows that create "high-assurance" code. Whether you know it or not, you use this type of cryptography code every day: in your browser, your messaging apps, and your favorite programming language standard libraries.
Chiao-Lin Yu (Steven Meow)
What happens when AI-powered criminals meet AI-powered hunters? A technical arms race where both sides are vibing their way through exploitation—and the backdoors write themselves. In October 2025, we investigated Taiwan's fake delivery scam ecosystem targeting convenience store customers. What started as social engineering on social media became a deep dive into two distinct fraud platforms—both bearing the unmistakable fingerprints of AI-generated code. Their developers left more than just bugs: authentication flaws, file management oversights, and database implementations that screamed "I asked LLM and deployed without reading." We turned their sloppiness into weaponized OSINT. Through strategic reconnaissance, careful database analysis, and meticulous operational security, we achieved complete system access on multiple fraud infrastructures. By analyzing server artifacts and certificate patterns, we mapped 100+ active domains and extracted evidence linking thousands of victim transactions worth millions of euros in fraud. But here's the twist: we used the same AI tools they did, just with better prompts. The takeaway isn't just about hunting scammers—it's about the collapse of the skill gap in both offense and defense. When vibe coding meets vibe hacking, the underground economy democratizes in ways we never anticipated. We'll share our methodology for fingerprinting AI-assisted crime infrastructure, discuss the ethical boundaries of counter-operations, and demonstrate how to build sustainable threat intelligence pipelines when your adversary can redeploy in 5 minutes. This talk proves that in 2025, the real exploit isn't zero-day—it's zero-understanding.
Manuel Rábade
The Emergency Alert System (EAS) and its SAME (Specific Area Message Encoding) protocol are public alerting technologies that broadcast short digital bursts over VHF triggering emergency messages on millions of receivers across North America. In Mexico, this technology was integrated into the Seismic Alert System (SASMEX) which more than 30 million people in the central part of the country rely on to prepare for frequent earthquakes. While new alerting technologies have emerged, the EAS-SAME network continues to play an important role for public safety in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. Yet, the same small packets of bits that can help protect a city could also, in the wrong hands, destabilize it. This talk examines how these systems operate and reveals a troubling truth: spoofing these alerts is far easier than most people expect.
Jakob Sponholz, Kathrin Klapper, Lena Christina Müller
Könntest du jetzt noch sagen, was du heute online gemacht hast? Für viele ist das Internet so selbstverständlich, dass sie es kaum noch merken, wenn sie es benutzen. Dennoch sind viele Menschen unfreiwillig aus der digitalen Welt ausgeschlossen. Wie könnte das Internet für alle nutzbar werden?
Andreas family & friends Hamburg, Birgit family & friends Hamburg
Mit den Prozessen im Budapest-Komplex wird ein Exempel statuiert - nicht nur gegen Einzelne, sondern gegen antifaschistische Praxis insgesamt. Die Behauptung einer kriminellen Vereinigung mit Mordabsichten stellt eine absurde juristische Eskalation des staatlichen Vorgehens gegen Antifaschist*innen dar und steht in keinem Verhältnis zu den verhandelten Vorkommnissen. Die Verfahren in dieser Weise zu verfolgen, lässt vor allem auf ein hohes Ausforschungs- und Einschüchterungsinteresse schließen. Mit dieser Prozesswelle und den Repressionen gegen Freund*innen und Angehörige wird antifaschistisches Engagement massiv kriminalisiert und ein verzerrtes Bild von politischem Widerstand gezeichnet - während gleichzeitig rechte Gewalt europaweit zunimmt und faschistische Parteien erstarken. Wir sehen, dass Angriffe auf Rechtsstaatlichkeit und Zivilgesellschaft immer weiter zunehmen. Die Art und Weise, wie gegen die Antifas im Budapest-Komplex und im Antifa-Ost Verfahren vorgegangen wird ist ein Vorgeschmack darauf, wie politische Opposition in einer autoritären Zukunft behandelt werden könnte. Wir sind alle von der rechtsautoritären Entwicklung, von Faschisierung betroffen. Die Kriminalisierung von Antifas als "terroristische Vereinigung" ist Teil einer (weltweiten) Entdemokratisierung und Zersetzung von Rechtsstaatlichkeit.
Mike Perry
HostileShop is a python-based tool for generating prompt injections and jailbreaks against LLM agents. I created HostileShop to see if I could use LLMs to write a framework that generates prompt injections against LLMs, by having LLMs attack other LLMs. It's LLMs all the way down. HostileShop generated prompt injections for a winning submission in OpenAI's GPT-OSS-20B RedTeam Contest. Since then, I have expanded HostileShop to generate injections for the entire LLM frontier, as well as to mutate jailbreaks to bypass prompt filters, adapt to LLM updates, and to give advice on performing injections against other agent systems. In this talk, I will give you an overview of LLM Agent hacking. I will cover LLM context window formats, LLM agents, agent vulnerability surface, and the prompting and efficiency insights that led to the success of HostileShop.
Dirk
While FPGA developers usually try to minimize the power consumption of their designs, we approached the problem from the opposite perspective: what is the maximum power consumption that can be achieved or wasted on an FPGA? Short answer: we found that it’s easy to implement oscillators running at 6 GHz that can theoretically dissipate around 20 kW on a large cloud FPGA when driving the signal to all the available resources. It is interesting to note that this power density is not very far away from that of the surface of the sun. However, such power load jump is usually not a problem as it will trigger some protection circuitry. This led us to the next question: would a localized hotspot with such power density damage the chip if we remain within the typical power envelope of a cloud FPGA (~100 W)? While we could not “fry” the chip or induce permanent errors (and we tried several variants), we did observe that a few routing wires aged to become up to 70% slower in just a few days of stressing the chip. This basically means that such an FPGA cannot be rented out to cloud users without risking timing violations. In this talk, we will present how we optimized power wasting, how we measured wire latencies with ps accuracy, how we attacked 100 FPGA cloud instances and how we can protect FPGAs against such DOS attacks.
Matthias Monroy
The USA is demanding from all 43 countries in the "Visa Waiver Programme" (VWP), which enables visa-free travel, to conclude an "Enhanced Border Security Partnership" (EBSP). This is intended to grant US authorities direct access to police databases in these - mostly European - countries containing fingerprints, facial images and other personal data. Anyone who refuses this forced "border partnership" faces exclusion from the visa-free travel programme.
Rahel Becker, Anna Kassautzki
Zwischen offenen Briefen, Massenmails, Petitionen und Kaffee trinken : Zwei Ex-Insiderinnen aus dem Digitalausschuss und Bundestag erzählen, wie politische Einflussnahme wirklich funktioniert. Ein ehrlicher Blick hinter die Kulissen parlamentarischer Entscheidungsfindung – mit praktischen Tipps, wie die Zivilgesellschaft ihre Energie dort einsetzt, wo sie wirklich Wirkung entfaltet.
Thomas Knüsel
Milliarden von Kameras produzieren täglich Bilder, die zunehmend von Maschinen analysiert werden. In dieser Lecture Performance beleuchten wir die Entwicklung des maschinellen Sehens – von den frühen algorithmischen Ansätzen bis zu den heutigen Anwendungen – und schauen, wie verschiedene Künstler:innen diese Technologien nutzen und reflektieren. Anhand der beiden Arbeiten „Throwback Environment” und „Fomes Fomentarius Digitalis” betrachten wir die Nutzung des maschinellen Sehens in einem künstlerischen Feedback-Loop. Die Arbeiten machen sichtbar, was die eingesetzten Algorithmen sehen und in welchen Mustern sie operieren.
Norman Müller-Schmitz, lukas-schmukas, James Bonne d'age
Come on stage and present things you are very bad in. Or just mediocre. Get raging applause and love from the audience! Hosted by the drag-quings Norman Müller-Schmitz and James Bonne d'age this open stage celebrates trying, failing and the beauty of discovering hidden Talents together when the most beautiful cuties from the audience enter the stage to try something they have absolutely no experience in.