Organizers

The CTS is organized by RF-enthusiast researchers working with Trend Micro Research, mostly in their free time or as part of their RF security research.

The father of the CTS is Jonathan Andersson, who has been working on RF research for quite a long time (at PacSec 2016 he showed how he reverse-engineered a DSMx protocol, like the one used in DJI drones and created a custom hardware device to hijack an in-flight drone as a PoC). Jonathan is the one who crafts the vast majority of the CTS challenges.

In 2018, two other researchers joined the CTS crew: Marco Balduzzi and Federico Maggi, both working with Trend Micro Research.

Marco worked on RF security since 2014, when he published (together with his colleagues) an in-depth analysis of Automated Identification Systems (AIS) used for vessel positioning systems, showing that the protocol allowed spoofing of vessels' coordinates.

Federico, Marco, and Jonathan started working together since summer 2018. In collaboration with other colleagues from Trend Micro Research, they worked on a research that unveiled 10 design vulnerabilities in industry-grade radio remote controllers, which would allow in-range attackers to fully control heavy industrial machines (e.g., cranes, hoists, drillers, mining machines).

During this recent research project, Federico created RFQuack, a versatile RF-analysis hardware-software platform, which helps reverse engineering radio protocols. RFQuack has modular hardware and easily-configurable firmware that allows to interact with it from the command line, to sniff, manipulate, and transmit data over RF.