Cycleoverride 2020 – 10th Defcon Bike Ride & #Badgelife (help wanted)

So – Bruce and I were speaking over the weekend and started talking about the fact that it’s the 10 year anniversary of Cycle Override. It all started with some poor communication skills and here we are!

As I’ve been reflecting on this – Bruce and I (and countless others) have done over 20 rides and close to 8000 miles each of riding, but what’s more impressive is the number of hackers/info sec people we have brought together in the name of cycling.

The Defcon Bike Ride in 2019 (the 9th version) had 50 people on the ride. My guess is that almost 300 different people have ridden with us at some point over the past 10 years. To me – if I think of what I would have wished we accomplished with our rides (from every Derbycon except this year, to unplanned winter bike rides at Shmoocon) – is the community the we have enabled. It’s frankly amazing to me how many people have gotten engaged over 6 or 7am bike ride at conferences which go well into the evening.

All the above being said, it’s my desire to make the 10th annual Defcon Bike Ride something special. That means jerseys, tshirts, stickers, of course. But I want to do something a bit more special.

Badgelife

At Defcon 27 – it became clear to me that the Defcon community has embraced the #badgelife scene. I informally counted at least 15 different badges, and I left Saturday, and pretty much camped out at the OpenSoc CTF event at the Blue Team Village.

This tells me there is an interest in badges. Combine that with my ability to sign up with more than I can handle – and Bruce and I have agreed that we’d like to design a badge that has the following themes:

• cycling (duh)
• some sort of challenge system that unlocks more content ( e.g. you need to checkin at the mid point of the bike ride to get the 10th anniversary badge and it’s challenges)
• probably crypto since we both have a <3 for privacy
• Some Blue Team type theme, since we both do blue team work at Syncurity and Expel.io
• NFC
• Anything else that comes to mind
• Have an official 10th anniversary party at Defcon

How will this go down?

So – I need help. What I plan on doing is building out a set of requirements for a board (think of something like your front crank on your bike. Figure out what lights/comms/display/and challenges we want to embed, and outsource the hardware.

How I need help?

I will need help coding the functionality into the badge. I will need a few QA testers. I will need people to help me get the word out so I don’t have to shoulder the entire cost myself. ( We will likely be doing pre-orders with and have a small amount for sale in Vegas. ).

I’m looking for people that want to learn about writing (probably Python) for badges. Doing some cross badge comms, programming some images and who knows what I don’t know about. If you are interested – tweet at us (@cycle_override), email us (info at cycleoverride dot org) or find us somehow.

Finally – thank

To ten years! — the Cycleoverride crew