Since i know about defcon when i was fresh out of college, i had a dream of speaking there one day.
I never thought it will take me 17 years in my career to be able to speak at defcon.
How it started?
I started speaking at conferences since 2020, been doing lot of workshops on fuzzing. I also started creating lot of videos on youtube about fuzzing. One day one of the person watching my videos, approached me about defcon29 and said why don’t i submit my workshop there. I like the idea and so i decided to go ahead and submit my workshop.
Luckily my workshop was selected at defcon29:
https://forum.defcon.org/node/237326
I was very excited but to my surprise, it was covid time and travel was restricted to USA from India. Which means i can not travel for my workshop and there was no option to have virtual workshop. So i had to pass that on with the hope that next year(in 2022) hopefully i am going to make it and can travel.
Submitting Again
So at the start of 2022, when call for workshop for Defcon30 opened, i decided to submit again.
Fast forward, in June 2022 i received the confirmation that my workshop has been selected for Defcon30.
The Experience
I travelled to vegas, and there was lot of interest in my workshop. I also got some stickers printed to distribute over there. Having stickers with you is a good way to strike a conversation with various people.
My workshop went well, there were lot of people from different background. They asked me lot of questions, queries and were very supportive and encouraged me. Instead of powerpoint slides, i used google codelabs for the workshop contents. This makes it easy for attendees to follow along. I also created one VM which i shared with attendees. This VM contents all the tools and softwares which were required for my workshop.
I covered different types of vulnerabilities, various theory part about fuzzers and had lot of exercises for different part of workshop, I was so happy to see that attendees were able to work on all the exercises and fuzz softwares with AFL in the end.
This was one of the best workshop experience i had. Also this was one of the first in person workshop i conducted after covid time.
Gratitude
I would like to thank Defcon for giving me this opportunity to conduct my workshop, also would like to thanks all the attendees for their support, encouragement and enthusiasm for my workshop.
Contents for my workshop
If you want to know more about fuzzing, i have uplaoded my workshop contents at the link given below, it also has a VM download link for the workshop. you can download the VM and follow along the contents:
http://fuzzing.in/codelabs/finding_security_vulnerabilities/index.html?index=..%2F..index#0
I hope to submit my workshop at more conferences in future, if you are coming along, i would be happy to meet!
Thanks
Hardik
Hardik05's Blog 