Introduction to Software Defined Radios and RF Hacking

Presented at DEF CON 30 (2022), Aug. 11, 2022, 2 p.m. (240 minutes)

This class is a beginner's introduction to practical Software Defined Radio (SDR) applications and development with an emphasis on hands-on learning. If you have ever been curious about the invisible world of radio waves and signals all around you, but didn’t know where to begin, then this workshop is for you. Students can expect to learn about basic RF theory and SDR architecture before moving on to hands-on development with real radios. The instructor will guide students through progressively more complicated RF concepts and waveforms, culminating in a small capstone exercise. For this workshop, you must provide your own laptop and SDR. You can either purchase a RTL-SDR dongle kit which includes an antenna, small tripod, and a receive-only USB SDR for this class beforehand and bring it to the conference, or use a commercial SDR you already own. VMs will be made available to students to download before class, along with an OS setup guide for those that prefer a bare-metal install. The VM/OS will have all the required drivers and frameworks to interface with the radio hardware. My intent for this class is to lower the barrier of entry associated with RF topics, and for that reason I would like to emphasize that the workshop is geared toward complete beginner students with no prior experience working with SDRs; DEF CON attendees who already have experience with SDRs will likely find this course too simple. Materials: Students will need to come with the following: A laptop capable of running an Ubuntu VM (or an install of Ubuntu). The VM/OS installation guide will be given out before Defcon. Digital Signals Processing is typically very computationally intensive, so I recommend a laptop with a 4 core processor and 8GB of RAM. A Software Defined Radio, as this workshop is bring-your-own-device. I highly recommend a RTL2832 chip based kit that comes with a USB-powered SDR and an antenna mount. Two brands to consider are RTL-SDR and Nooelec. They are essentially the same, and I would pick whatever SDR is in stock at the time. Make sure to pick the kit that comes with the antenna accessories and not just the USB dongle. It should be between $40 to $50 USD: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/ https://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-receivers/nesdr-smart.html If you already own a SDR (like a HackRF or one of the RTL-chip dongles) you can also use that. Just make sure to bring/buy an antenna. Due to supply-chain issues, if you need to purchase a SDR for this workshop I highly recommend doing so ASAP. Prereq: None, this is a workshop for complete beginners, although having some basic python knowledge would be a plus

Presenters:

  • Rich - Research Scientist
    Rich currently works as a research scientist focusing on radio communications and digital signals processing applications. Before making the jump to research, he was a RF engineer and embedded software developer working on prototype radio systems and DSP tools. He is passionate about radios and wireless technology and will happily talk for hours on the subject.

Similar Presentations: