This week was HackSpaceCon 2024. It was the first time I attended and it was fantastic.

The conference was at the Kennedy Space Center! Yes, right there and the swag and talks matched the world class location.

The keynote “Buckle up! Let’s make the world a safer place” was by Dave Kennedy, who provided great insights on attacker strategies of the past and present, the importance of active threat hunting and challenges ahead. A great specific example he gave was how simple modifications to off-the-shelf malware (still) go entirely under the radar.

The conference was filled with lots of other great talks from API security, to hardware hacking and of course a lot of AI talks, including mine about prompt injections. Thanks for coming by and also for all the interesting questions.

Slides

There were some requests for sharing the slides of my talk. They can be found here. The slides are a pdf export, so no demo videos as its otherwise too large.

Besides the many real-world prompt injection exploit demos, the section about ASCII Smuggling was received well by the audience. It’s one of these somewhat “crazy” new TTPs.

Thanks also for the great questions and discussions about LLM and AI security.

Happy Speaker

Walking around the visitor center was really very exciting.

I also got to talk a bus tour that passed by the VAB, the vehicle assembly building, where NASA assembles vehicles and stacks rockets.

Villages

There were a set of villages, like adversary village, hardware hacking, but also a drone village:

Kudos

Shout out to the organizers and the volunteers for making it such a great event!

Location, location, location!

And also, the location of the conference at the Kennedy Space Center was fantastic. This picture is from the rocket garden when I first passed through to head to the Center for Space Education where the conference was at.

Falcon 9 Launch

Last but not least, in the evening I even got to watch a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sending up Starlink satellites from the rooftop of my hotel.

It was amazing, phone picture doesn’t capture it but it was incredible how bright everything around the rocket and launchpad lights up once the engines ignite!

Anyhow. I had a blast, highly recommend this conference, thanks for reading and happy hacking.

References

• Slides of my talk
• HackSpaceCon Conference Site