Wir verlassen uns in unserem Alltag permanent auf die Verfügbarkeit von elektrischer Energie. Aber wenn wir vom dauerhaften Betrieb von Kraftwerke, die fossile Energieträger verbrennen, wie stellen wir die Versorgung sicher, wenn nachts kein Wind weht?
Elektrolyse oder Pumpspeicherkraftwerk? Superkondensatoren oder mechanische Speicher? Was geht heute überhaupt schon?

Ähnlich unklar ist die Zukunft der Mobilität, wenn Verbrennungsmotoren von unseren Straßen verschwinden sollen. Batteriefahrzeug oder Wasserstoffauto? Und bekommt man sein Fahrzeug überhaupt so schnell vollgetankt wie heute mit Benzin?

Als eins der größeren Probleme stellt sich die Bereitstellung elektrischer Energie für unsere hoch technologisierte Welt dar. Der Beitrag der aus erneuerbaren Energiequellen gewonnenen elektrischen Energie ist in den letzten Jahrzehnten beständig gestiegen, aber dennoch bleibt ein Problem: wie stellen wir Energie bereit, wenn keine Sonne scheint und kein Wind weht?
Ein Überblick über bekannte und weniger bekannte Energiespeicher soll erleichtern, aktuelle Diskussionen der Energie- und Klimapolitik zu verstehen und einzuordnen.
Batterien und Akkus liefern seit vielen Jahrzehnten den Strom für vor allem tragbare Geräte: Die allgegenwärtige, nicht wiederaufladbare Alkali-Mangan-Batterie speist Uren, Fernbedienungen, Taschenlampen und Geräte aller Art. Speziell die wiederaufladbare Lithium-Ionen-Batterie hat unsere moderne Welt revolutioniert, aus gutem Grund wurde diese Entwicklung dieses Jahr mit dem Nobelpreis in Chemie ausgezeichnet. Wird diese Technologie die Zukunft der Elektromobilität sein, und den überschüssigen Solarstrom speichern, um ihn nachts wieder zur Verfügung zu stellen?
Oder sollte die kaum bekannte Natriumsulfid Batteriechemie der bessere Kandidat sein? Wie macht man aus Solarstrom Wasserstoff, und wie speichert man diesen? Lohnt sich das überhaupt, und wenn ja, wie bekommt man daraus wieder elektrische Energie erzeugt?

Aktuell tobt eine erbitterte Debatte, ob die Elektromobilität in Zukunft nun auf reinen Batteriebetried setzen sollte, oder doch das Wasserstoffauto das Rennen machen soll. Gibt es eine klare Antwort darauf, und wie sind die jeweiligen Beiträge von Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft, Politik und Ethik?

Compared to software, the open source approach is relatively new to most actors in the field of (mechanical) hardware. Plus Open Source Hardware faces some special issues. A yet missing definition of its "source code" is one of them (+ patent law, liability, engineers that do not know how to work with git, costly prototyping…).
DIN SPEC 3105 will be/is the first official standard for Open Source Hardware and also the first official standard ever published under a free license (CC-BY-SA 4.0; that was a lot of lobby work ;) ). It defines the technology-specific "source" of Open Source Hardware and aims to build a bridge between research institutes, public authority, industry and the worldwide open source community.

In this talk I won't explain why Open Source (Hardware) is great. I assume, you all know that (if not, still feel free to ask me in the Q&A part or after the talk). I'll describe what's the standard for, how it works and why its great for Open Source Hardware.

Our research shows that network-based cache side-channel attacks are a realistic threat. Cache attacks have been traditionally used to leak sensitive data on a local setting (e.g., from an attacker-controlled virtual machine to a victim virtual machine that share the CPU cache on a cloud platform). With our attack called NetCAT, we show this threat extends to untrusted clients over the network, which can now leak sensitive data such as keystrokes in a SSH session from remote servers with no local access. The root cause of the vulnerability is a recent Intel feature called DDIO, which grants network devices and other peripherals access to the CPU cache. Originally, intended as a performance optimization in fast networks, we show DDIO has severe security implications, exposing servers in local untrusted networks to remote side-channel attacks.

Increased peripheral performance is causing strain on the memory subsystem of modern processors. For example, available DRAM throughput can no longer sustain the traffic of a modern network card. Scrambling to deliver the promised performance, instead of transferring peripheral data to and from DRAM, modern Intel processors perform I/O operations directly on the Last Level Cache (LLC). While Direct Cache Access (DCA) instead of Direct Memory Access (DMA) is a sensible performance optimization, it is unfortunately implemented without care for security, as the LLC is now shared between the CPU and all the attached devices, including the network card.

In this talk, we present the first security analysis of DDIO. Based on our analysis, we present NetCAT, the first network-based cache attack on the processor’s last-level cache of a remote machine. We show that NetCAT can break confidentiality of a SSH session from a third machine without any malicious software running on the remote server or client. The attacker machine does this by solely sending network packets to the remote server. netcat is also a famous utility that hackers and system administrators use to send information over the network. NetCAT is a pun on being able to read data from the network without cooperation from the other machine on the network. However, we received very mixed reactions on that pun. More details on this in the talk.

The vulnerability was acknowledged by Intel with a bounty and CVE-2019-11184 was assigned to track this issue. The public disclosure was on September 10, 2019.

Since the Snowden revelations the fear of stealthy hardware manipulations is no longer regarded as far fetched.
This fear is also reflected in the massive discussions sparked by last year's Bloomberg allegations on a supposed hardware spy implant on Supermicro serverboards or the recent USA ban on Huawei telecommunication equipment.

Hardware reverse engineering (HRE) is a promising method to detect such manipulations or hidden backdoors.
However, HRE is a highly complex and cumbersome task.
It takes months of work as well as expensive equipment to even obtain the netlist of a chip, the equivalent to the binary in software reverse engineering (SRE).
In contrast to SRE where various paid or open-source tools for binary analysis exist, e.g., IDA Pro or Ghidra, in HRE simply no tool for netlist analysis were available - neither commercial, nor free.
To close this gap, researchers from the Ruhr University Bochum developed HAL, the first open-source netlist analysis framework.

In this talk, we start with a basic introduction into the challenges of HRE.
Then, we demonstrate the capabilities of HAL before giving a brief overview on our current research with HAL.

Hardware reverse engineering (HRE) is an important technique for analysts to understand the internals of a physical system.
Use cases range from recovering interface specifications of old chips, over detection of malicious manipulations or patent infringements, to straight up counterfeiting.
However, HRE is a notably complex and cumbersome task which consists of two phases:
In the first phase the netlist, i.e., circuit description of a chip, has to be extracted from the physical device.
Such a netlist is equivalent to the binary in software reverse engineering (SRE).
In the second phase, the analyst then processes the netlist in order to understand (parts of) its functionality.

However, obtaining a netlist from a chip can take several months and requires professional and costly equipment as well as expertise.
Even with a recovered netlist, understanding its functionality is an enormously challenging task.
This is partly due to the lack of proper tools for netlist analysis:
While in SRE various commercial or open-source tools for binary analysis exist, e.g., IDA Pro or Ghidra, in HRE simply no tool for netlist analysis was available, neither commercial, nor free.
To close this gap, researchers from the Embedded Security group of the Horst-Görtz Institute for IT-Security at the Ruhr University Bochum developed HAL, the first open-source netlist analysis framework.
Inspired by the modularity of its SRE equivalents, HAL can be extended through optimized C++ plugins or directly used as a Python library, while at the same time offering a GUI for explorative and interactive analysis.
The project is supposed to give hardware analysts a common platform for the development of new algorithms with a portable design, ultimately aiding both professionals in their daily work as well as researchers in their efforts to publish reproducible results.

In this talk, we will first introduce the foundations and main challenges of HRE, before giving a live demonstration of HAL and some of its capabilities on selected case studies.
We conclude the talk with a glimpse at our associated research at the university that spans both, technical research as well as cross-disciplinary work with psychologists.

Our talk requires only minimum prior knowledge on digital hardware.

Non-isolated DC/DC converters

DC-to-DC converters are cheap and ubiquitous, but many still feel uncomfortable using them. In this talk I will talk about step-down (buck) and step-up (boost) converters, covering the basics in an easy-to-understand form, and touching on the knowledge you need to build your own.

This talk will be enjoyable for you if you have basic electronics knowledge: you understand what voltage, resistance, and current mean.

Outline

• Theory of operation explained with illustrations
• Synchronous and asynchronous converters: advantages and disadvantages
• How to chose and evaluate cheap DC/DC converter modules you can buy online
• Efficiency and sources of energy loss
• Features you might want: Enable, Current Limiting, Undervoltage Protection
• Control modes: voltage mode, current mode, and hysteretic mode
• Unstable converters, and how to fix them
• Switching noise, and how to deal with it
• What if you need more voltage? Boost converters!

The Achilles heel of [your secure device] is the secure boot chain. In this presentation we will show our results from auditing commonly used boot loaders and walk through the attack surface you open yourself up to. You would be surprised at how much attack surface exists when hardening and defense in depth is ignored. From remote attack surface via network protocol parsers to local filesystems and various BUS parsing, we will walk through the common mistakes we've seen by example and showcase how realistic it is for your product's secure boot chain to be compromised.

There's a variety of places - on Earth and beyond - that pose challenging conditions to the ever-shrinking digital circuits of today. Making those tiny transistors work reliably when bombarded with charged particles in the vacuum of space, in the underground tunnels of CERN or in your local hospital's X-ray machine is not an easy feat. This talk is going to shed some light on what can be done to keep particles from messing up your ones and zeroes, how errors in digital circuits can be detected and corrected, and how you may even re-purpose those flipped bits in your RAM as a particle detector.

This talk will introduce the audience to the class of problems that digital circuits are faced with in challenging radiation environments. Such environments include satellites in space, the electronics inside particle accelerators and also a variety of medical applications. After giving an overview of the various effects that may cause malfunctions, different techniques for detection and mitigation of such effects are presented. Some of these techniques concern the transistor-level design of digital circuits, others include triple modular redundancy (TMR) and correction codes. Some open source software solutions that aid in the design and verification of circuits hardened against such problems are presented, and of course a 'lessons learned' from our experiences in the field of particle detector electronics will be shared.

With Nextcloud you can sync, share and collaborate on data, but you don't need to put your photos, calendars or chat logs on an American server. Nope, Nextcloud is self-hosted and 100% open source! Thanks to hundreds of apps, Nextcloud can do a lot and in this talk, I will highlight some cool things.

Consider this a follow-up from my talk about 200 things Nextcloud can do last year! An update on what's new and some cool new stuff. What, what is Nextcloud? Let's see. A private cloud is one way to put it, though that's a contradiction of course. It is a way to share your data, sync your files, communicate and collaborate with others - without giving your data to GAFAM! Keep it on your own server, or something close (like a local hosting provider or data center). Nextcloud is a PHP app that does all that, and more! Easy to use, secure (really) and fully open source of course.