Throwback - What happened at Disobey 2020

Writer: Karoliina Kemppainen

Now that we are all stuck inside let’s have a little throwback to last February when we actually could still meet each other in person. On February our brave CinCan project team participated in the nordic security event Disobey.

View from rooftop sauna Verner. Pic taken by: Juha Kälkäinen

Sauna on Friday!

Did you know that there is quite amazing rooftop sauna at Kaapelitehdas? We did! That’s why we rented it to have a little meet up with people who are interested about CinCan project and could give us feedback. Topics which we wanted to discuss were something like; Where are we headed? Have we been doing the right things? Is this usable for you and/or your company? What we haven’t been thinking by ourselves?

Around 30 people came to listen our rants, achievements and work that had been done within last year. There have been lot of different research areas and approaches tried out during this 2,5 year project. Not all of it is relevant any more but nothing has been in vain. After all this have been truly a research and development type of project.

We had many nice chats during the evening. Thanks for everyone who came and showed us support and love!

Let's work at workshop

On Saturday evening we had a workshop where main focus was to introduce our CinCan tools to all interested participants. We also wanted to give sneak peak to digital forensics and how some common analysis tasks can be done.

First we gave short presentation about the project background. After 15 minutes basic introduction we started the actual hands-on exercises. We had prepared 5 different digital forensics exercise which were intended to solve using CinCan tools. Tasks were memorydump, android apk, firmware, log and phishing analysis. Tasks varied from beginner level to professional because we couldn’t know beforehand how experienced participants would be.

Discussing with participants gave us nice insight. For example when you’re highly technically skilled individual and/or you’re already familiar with digital forensics, cincan tools seems to be quite easily approachable. But it also requires quite a lot of previous knowledge about many other softwares than just CinCan. Git, python, (+possible virtual environments) and docker are all used with CinCan tools. In optimal situation user should be able to use CinCan tools only with basic knowledge about the other necessary software. We are currently working towards easier approach.

Workshop had about 49 participants when we started. After two hours around 20 people remained and we closed our workshop after three hours. Attendants varied from digital forensics professionals to enthusiastic hobbyists, all hacker minded people!

All our workshop materials can be found from our gitlab repository

Thanks Disobey for having us! We're looking forward next year's event!