the DEF CON badge
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DEF CON's conference badge, which since 2006 has usually been a working piece of electronics carrying a multi-stage puzzle - designed for years by Joe Grand, known as Kingpin - and the seed of the wider badgelife culture of independent hardware badges.
Solving the badge is a competition in itself, drawing teams that work through the conference on ciphers, hidden hardware interfaces and cross-badge protocols. The side effect is educational: thousands of people who had never touched a soldering iron or a serial console learned hardware hacking because the conference pass was itself the lesson. Badgelife grew into an economy of independent creators shipping small runs of custom electronics, which is a hardware-hacking on-ramp disguised as merchandise.
Also known as: badgelife, electronic badge, badge hacking, kingpin badge