CactusCon

*THANK YOU for another incredible year!*

🌵 see you all again in 2025 🌵

Stealing a password through interpretive dance, and other wild video game hacks

Like you, I play a lot of video games. The thing is, computers have this weird habit of breaking whenever I'm near them. It's a gift and a curse.

Here I'll be dropping six really fun remotely exploitable hacks for Super Smash Bros: Melee and Magic: the Gathering open source applications and libraries. I'll walk through each of them with exploits and examples for your enjoyment. They run the gamut from memory corruption vulnerabilities in esoteric embedded environments to subtle networking interactions with large consequences.

It's all fun and games until someone loses a password.

Dan "AltF4" Petro is Lead Researcher at Bishop Fox, a consulting firm providing cybersecurity services to the Fortune 500, global financial institutions, and high-tech startups. In this role, he focuses on application penetration testing and network penetration testing.

Dan likes to hear himself talk, often resulting in conference presentations including many consecutive talks at Black Hat USA and DEF CON in addition to appearances at HOPE, BSides, ToorCon, CactusCon, and probably more. He is widely known for the tools he creates: the Rickmote Controller (a Chromecast-hacking device), Untwister (a tool used for breaking pseudorandom number generators) and SmashBot (a merciless Smash Bros noob-pwning machine).

Dan holds has a Master of Science in Computer Science from Arizona State University and still doesn't regret it.