DEF CON 20 - Dustin Hoffman and Semon Rezchikov - Busting the BARR
Channel: DEFCONConference
Date: 2013-10-30

Busting the BARR: Tracking "Untrackable" Private Aircraft for Fun &Profit
Dustin Hoffman President & Senior Engineer, Exigent Systems Inc.
Semon Rezchikov Independent Researcher

Private aircraft provide transportation to interesting people: corporate officers, business owners, celebrities, high net-worth individuals, etc.

In recent years, sites like FlightAware have made it trivial to access all public flight plans. However, aircraft owners can opt into a block list (the BARR) that prevents their flight information from being made public. All the interesting people are on the BARR.

We'll explain the basics of how the the ATC system and sites like FlightAware work, demonstrate a serious, unpatchable method for tracking otherwise "untrackable", BARRed aircraft, and demo our site that lets you do the same.

Dustin Hoffman is the president and senior engineer of Exigent Systems Inc., an IT services firm based in Southern California. He's interested in how all kinds of complex systems work and interact, whether technical, organizational, legal, or economic. He's held a Private Pilot's certificate (PPSEL) since 2008.

Semon Rezchikov is an independent security researcher and synthetic biologist. He masterminded last year's presentation on the FAST Airport Security System and is a 20 Under 20 Fellow. Over the summer, he's building flexible bioautomation robots and simulating synthetic morphogenetic multicellular patterning for MIT's Weiss Lab for Synthetic Biology. In his free time, he can be found playing around with mathematics, reading too many papers, and thinking of ways to mess with the systems around him.