Meshing Stuff Up

Presented at THOTCON 0x4 (2013), April 26, 2013, noon (25 minutes).

We want to crush all the misinformation and mesh all the phones. Tired of the cellular network going down or WiFi being untrustworthy? Join the SPAN team in a deep dive of mesh / mobile ad-hoc networking of Android devices. Before they were a team, the members of project SPAN thought it was highly limiting to only be able to network smart phones over standard Wi-Fi or with a Cellular infrastructure. Honestly, the SPAN team isn't a big fan of infrastructure-based networks in general. They wanted a headless, dynamic network that allowed for resilient communications when the other infrastructure either wasn't available or when they just didn't feel like using it. They also really liked the idea of a communication system where there was no central router, server or other central point of sniffing of data. With this in mind, they teamed up and created project SPAN (Smart Phone AdHoc Networks). They decided to open source the project and to share not only the code but also the whole process and idea with the community at large. The team is annoyed that the current generation smart phone radios have the intrinsic ability to communicate directly with one another, but hardware vendors and mobile OS frameworks don’t make it easy to do so. Let us show you how it can be done and the fun that can be had from it. Join the SPAN team for a deep dive into the Android network stack implementation and its limitations, an analysis of the Wi-Fi chipsets in the current generation of smart phones and a collection of lessons learned when writing your own network routing protocol. The team will also share a "How To" walkthrough into implementing your own Mesh network and incorporating general "Off Grid" concepts into your next project; this will include securing your mesh from outside parties while tunneling and bridging through the internet. The team will delve into specific Android limitations of Ad-Hoc networking and provide workarounds and bypass mechanisms. Lastly, the team will expound upon securing the mesh landscape and how to effectively evade traffic sniffing over an inherently open network.


Presenters:

  • Josh Thomas / m0nk as Josh "m0nk" Thomas
    Josh "m0nk" Thomas is a Security researcher, mobile phone geek, mesh networking evangelist and general breaker of things electronic. His past projects have commonly spanned the hardware / software barrier and rarely have a UI. He's spent the past 12 years poking at embedded systems, networks, IP stacks, AI and right-time communication systems. A code monkey at heart, m0nk has spent the last year digging deep into Android and iOS internals, with a major focus on both the network stack implementations and the driver / below driver hardware interfaces. He uses IDA more frequently than Eclipse, really just likes playing with gadgets and wants to make the world a better place. His life dream is to ride a robot unicorn on a moonlit beach. m0nk is currently employed by Accuvant LABS R&D Team.

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