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Udbhav Tiwari, Meredith Whittaker
Agentic AI is the catch-all term for AI-enabled systems that propose to complete more or less complex tasks on their own, without stopping to ask permission or consent. What could go wrong? These systems are being integrated directly into operating systems and applications, like web browsers. This move represents a fundamental paradigm shift, transforming them from relatively neutral resource managers into an active, goal-oriented infrastructure ultimately controlled by the companies that develop these systems, not by users or application developers. Systems like Microsoft's "Recall," which create a comprehensive "photographic memory" of all user activity, are marketed as productivity enhancers, but they function as OS-level surveillance and create significant privacy vulnerabilities. In the case of Recall, we’re talking about a centralized, high-value target for attackers that poses an existential threat to the privacy guarantees of meticulously engineered applications like Signal. This shift also fundamentally undermines personal agency, replacing individual choice and discovery with automated, opaque recommendations that can obscure commercial interests and erode individual autonomy. This talk will review the immediate and serious danger that the rush to shove agents into our devices and digital lives poses to our fundamental right to privacy and our capacity for genuine personal agency. Drawing from Signal's analysis, it moves beyond outlining the problem to also present a "tourniquet" solution: looking at what we need to do *now* to ensure that privacy at the application layer isn’t eliminated, and what the hacker community can do to help. We will outline a path for ensuring developer agency, granular user control, radical transparency, and the role of adversarial research.
Constanze Kurz, Franziska Görlitz
Wer nutzt in Deutschland Software von Palantir und wer hat das in naher Zukunft vor? Was sind die rechtlichen Voraussetzungen für den Einsatz solcher Analysewerkzeuge? Und was plant Innenminister Alexander Dobrindt in Sachen Palantir für die Polizeien des Bundes?
Felix Domke, Karsten Burger
Let's have a (hopefully) final look at Diesel emission cheating. This technical talk summarizes what I learned by reverse-engineering dozens of engine ECU software, how I found and characterized "interesting logic" which, more often than not, ended up being a court-approved "defeat device". What started as a "curious investigation" in 2015 to obtain a ground truth to widespread media reports of "VW being caught for cheating" ended up as a full-blown journey through the then-current state of the Diesel car industry. In this talk, Karsten and Felix will walk through the different implementation of defeat devices, their impact on emissions, and the challenges in documenting seemingly black boxes in court-proven expert reports.
Romain Malmain
Mobile phones are central to everyday life: we communicate, entertain ourselves, and keep vast swaths of our digital lives on them. That ubiquity makes high-risk groups such as journalists, activists, and dissidents prime targets for sophisticated spyware that exploits device vulnerabilities. On Android devices, GPU drivers have repeatedly served as the final escalation vector into the kernel. To study and mitigate that risk, we undertook a research project to virtualize the Qualcomm Android kernel and the KGSL graphics driver from scratch in QEMU. This new environment enables deep debugging, efficient coverage collection, and large-scale fuzzing across server farms, instead of relying on a handful of preproduction devices. This talk will highlight the technical aspects of our research, starting with the steps required to boot the Qualcomm mobile kernel in QEMU, all the way up to the partial emulation of the GPU. Then, we will present how we moved from our emulation prototype to a full-fledged fuzzer based on LibAFL QEMU.
Jaša Hiergeblieben, Polylux, Lisa Zugezogen
Im Osten stehen nächstes Jahr schon wieder Wahlen an und schon wieder sieht alles danach aus, als ob die AfD eine Regierungsbeteiligung bekommen könnte. Ganz konkret: In Sachsen-Anhalt und Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Nicht nur diese "rosigen" Aussichten, sondern auch aktuelle Bevölkerungsprognosen werfen gar kein günstiges Licht auf die Regionen. Linke Akteur:innen vor Ort kämpfen täglich dagegen an und sie brauchen unsere Solidarität. Wir müssen dem etwas entgegensetzen. Egal ob als Hacker:innen auf dem Congress oder Westdeutsche in (noch) Grünen Gemeinden. Wo kommt das alles her? Wer macht aktuell etwas dagegen und wie können wir dem rechten Sog begegnen?
Martha Root, Eva Hoffmann, Christian Fuchs
WhiteDate ist eine Plattform weißer Suprematist:innen, die sich an Rassist:innen und Antisemit:innen richtet – und auf veralteter Infrastruktur basiert. Was die 8000 Mitglieder nicht wussten: Einige der Nazis flirteten dieses Jahr mit realistisch wirkenden Chatbots - und verliebten sich sogar in sie. Mit einer Kombination aus automatisierter Konversationsanalyse, Web-Scraping und klassischen OSINT-Methoden verfolgten wir öffentliche Spuren und identifizierten die Personen hinter der Seite. Dieser Vortrag zeigt, wie KI-Personas und investigatives Denken extremistische Netzwerke aufdecken und wie Algorithmen gegen Extremismus eingesetzt werden können.
Johanna-Leonore Dahlhoff, Peter Klohmann, Alireza Meghrazi Solouklou, Mirweis Neda, Maria Carolina Pardo Reyes, Eduardo Sabella, Sarah Luisa Wurmer, Berivan Canbolat
Das Bridges Kammerorchester hackt die klassische Musikszene, indem es die Regeln des traditionellen Konzertbetriebs aufbricht: Musiker*innen mit und ohne Flucht- und Migrationsbiografie bringen Instrumente wie Oud, Tar, Kamanche oder Daf in die europäische Orchestertradition. Statt überwiegend Werke verstorbener männlicher, europäischer Komponisten zu spielen, komponieren die Mitglieder ihre Musik selbst – ein radikaler Perspektivwechsel hin zu Vielfalt und Selbstbestimmung. Im Vortrag zeigen sie anhand von Hörbeispielen und persönlichen Geschichten, wie diese Hacks entstehen und machen im Anschluss in einem Konzert die musikalische Vielfalt live erlebbar.
Benjamin W. Broersma
ORM's and/or developers don't understand databases, transactions, or concurrency.
Tobias Höller
Science is hard and research into the usage of the Tor network is especially so. Since it was designed to counter suveillance, it gathering reliable information is difficult. As a consequence, the studies we do have, have yielded very different results. This talk investigates the root causes of contradicting studies by highlighting how slight changes in methodology or data selection completely change the results and thereby our understanding of what the Darknet is. Whether you consider it the last bastion of freedom or a haven of crime, this talk will tell you where to look and what to ignore in order to confirm your current opinion. And in case you are open to changing it, we have some food for thought for you.
Kire, Rahel
Auch in der Schweizer Netzpolitik ging es im auslaufenden Jahr drunter und drüber. Wir blicken mit gewohntem Schalk auf das netzpolitische Jahr 2025 zwischen Bodensee und Matterhorn zurück - und diskutieren jene Themen, die relevant waren und relevant bleiben.
Benjamin Kollenda
EntrySign opened the door to custom microcode on AMD Zen CPUs earlier this year. Using a weakness in the signature verification we can load custom microcode updates and modify behavior of stock AMD Zen 1-5 CPUs. While AMD has released patches to address this weakness on some CPUs, we can still use unpatched systems for our analysis. In this talk we cover what we found out about microcode, what we saw in the microcode ROM, the tooling we build, how we worked to find out more and how you can write & test your own microcode on your own AMD Zen systems. We have our tools up on https://github.com/AngryUEFI for everyone to play around with and hopefully help us understand microcode more than we currently do.
Karim Hamdi
Hegemony Eroding is an ongoing art project exploring how generative AI reflects and distorts cultural representation. Its name speaks to its core ambition: to bear witness to the slow erosion of Western cultural hegemony by exposing the cracks in which other cultures shine through. This talk will discuss the blurry boundary between legitimate cultural representation and prejudice in AI-generated media and how generative AI can be used as a tool to explore humanity's digital foot print. It is permeated by a critique of purely profit-driven AI development and it's tendency to blunt artistic exploration and expression.
sjaelv, MultisampledNight
The Spectrum is a newly founded queer-feminist, intersectional hackspace centering FLINTA+, disabled, and marginalized beings. We see hacking as playful exploration—of technology, art, and ideas—to reimagine what inclusion and collaboration can be. At 39C3, we share how awareness, accessibility, and transdisciplinary creation can transform community and hack the norm.