DEF CON 2024-2025 research roundup

TL;DR: DEF CON 32 (2024) and DEF CON 33 (2025) doubled down on AI red teaming, hardware-root-of-trust failures (PKfail), satellite and aerospace hacking (Hack-a-Sat finals), automotive infotainment exploits, and cloud identity abuse. Villages — AI, Aerospace, ICS, Car Hacking, IoT, Bio, Packet — drove much of the novel research, while main-track talks delivered patch-diff-grade zero-days and supply-chain dissections. Pair this roundup with blackhat-2024-2025-research-roundup (its corporate sibling), pwn2own-2024-2025-research-roundup (the contest-driven cousin), and cubesat-attacks for the space-systems angle.

Why it matters

DEF CON is the world’s largest hacker conference and the de facto publication venue for offensive research that does not fit a vendor briefing. Unlike academic venues, talks ship working exploits, recordings, and slide decks within weeks of the event via the media.defcon.org archive. For a bug-bounty hunter or red teamer, scraping DEF CON every August is one of the highest-yield ways to refresh tradecraft (see keeping-up-with-research-feeds).

What changed in 2024-2025:

AI Village graduated from novelty to flagship — the Generative Red Team (GRT) at DC32 and the AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) semifinals at DC32 / finals at DC33 made AI security a first-class track.
Hardware root-of-trust took center stage with Binarly’s PKfail disclosure, presented at DC32 and expanded at DC33 (see pkfail-uefi-secureboot-bypass).
Aerospace Village hosted the final Hack-a-Sat 5 attack-defend competition at DC32, with on-orbit Moonlighter satellite challenges; DC33 pivoted to the Aerospace Village CTF and broader space-systems content.
Cloud identity bypasses — Entra cross-tenant sync abuse, OAuth device code phishing, conditional access gaps — dominated the cloud track (see entra-cross-tenant-sync-abuse, oauth-device-code-phishing-m365, conditional-access-bypass-modern).
Automotive: Car Hacking Village ran multi-OEM CTFs; main track had Tesla, Sonata, and Hyundai infotainment talks.

Classes, patterns, process

Villages of note

AI Village

DC32 (2024) ran the second public Generative Red Team in partnership with Humane Intelligence and the White House OSTP, generating one of the largest public corpora of LLM jailbreak / harm prompts. DC33 (2025) hosted the AIxCC semifinals (DARPA Cyber Challenge), pushing automated vulnerability discovery and patching on real OSS. Themes worth studying:

Prompt injection variants (indirect via documents, RAG poisoning).
Multi-modal jailbreaks (image-embedded text payloads).
Agentic abuse — tool-use exfiltration, sandbox escape (see ai-agent-sandbox-design).
Voice and deepfake bypasses (voice-cloning-liveness-bypass, deepfake-assisted-phishing).

Aerospace Village & Hack-a-Sat

Hack-a-Sat 5 (DC32, August 2024) was the final edition of the on-orbit CTF, with teams attacking and defending the Moonlighter satellite in low-earth orbit. Public writeups from the qualifying rounds and finals are gold for satellite tradecraft. DC33 transitioned to broader Aerospace Village CTFs, ADS-B / ACARS challenges, and avionics talks. Cross-reference cubesat-attacks and gps-gnss-spoofing.

ICS Village

Focus on OT protocols (Modbus, DNP3, OPC-UA), HMI exploitation, and ransomware impact on industrial environments. Notable DC32 content included PLC supply-chain implants and engineering workstation attacks.

Car Hacking Village

DC32 and DC33 both hosted CTFs with real vehicles. Main-track adjacent talks covered:

Tesla retbleed-style infotainment exploitation chains.
Hyundai / Kia head-unit research (post the 2023 USB-A “challenge” social media wave).
CAN bus injection via aftermarket dongles.
UDS diagnostic abuse for ECU re-flashing.

IoT Village

Router 0-days (TP-Link, Asus, Netgear), smart-lock bypasses, and “We hacked X consumer device” disclosures. Always check the village’s GitHub for full lab repos.

Bio Hacking Village

Medical device research — infusion pumps, pacemaker telemetry, FDA SBOM compliance discussion. DC33 expanded to AI-in-healthcare risk.

Packet Hacking Village (Wall of Sheep)

Network forensics CTFs and live SSID-tracking demos; useful for refreshing wifi-and-802-11-primer and evil-twin-and-karma-attacks.

Main-track themes

Hardware root-of-trust failures

PKfail (Binarly, DC32 main track): hundreds of UEFI firmware images shipped with the Platform Key from AMI’s DO_NOT_TRUST_AMI_TEST test certificate, breaking Secure Boot trust anchors across Lenovo, HP, Dell, Acer, and more. Deep dive: pkfail-uefi-secureboot-bypass and bootloader-and-secure-boot-attacks.
LogoFAIL follow-ups and SMM exploitation chains.
TPM sniffing and BitLocker pre-boot key exfiltration revisits.

Cloud identity & SaaS

Entra ID cross-tenant sync abuse — see entra-cross-tenant-sync-abuse.
OAuth device-code phishing operationalized — see oauth-device-code-phishing-m365.
Conditional Access bypasses via legacy protocols / token theft — see conditional-access-bypass-modern and aitm-evilginx-modern-phishing.
M365 admin role abuse and forensic gaps — m365-admin-attacks.

Supply chain

3CX retrospective and similar trojanized installers (see case-study-3cx-supply-chain).
Open-source registry typosquatting at scale.
CI/CD pivot — GitHub Actions OIDC abuse, self-hosted runner takeover.

Web & app security

HTTP request smuggling variants — see http-smuggling-modern-variants.
Cache deception / poisoning chains — cache-deception, cache-poisoning-modern-chains.
WAF bypasses presented in workshop form — waf-bypass-advanced-techniques.

Mobile & Apple ecosystem

iOS baseband and Secure Enclave talks — see ios-baseband-attacks, ios-keychain-and-secure-enclave-audit.
macOS TCC and Gatekeeper bypasses (macos-tcc, gatekeeper-bypasses).
checkm8 / BootROM retrospectives — ios-bootrom-checkm8.

DEF CON CTF Finals

DC32 (2024) finals: Won by Maple Bacon-adjacent merger / Blue Water (verify against the official 2024 results page when citing). Quals run by Nautilus Institute. Challenges leaned into Web3, hypervisor escapes, kernel exploitation, and weird-machine pwn.
DC33 (2025) finals: Continued Nautilus organization; finals are an attack-defend tournament with shared infrastructure. Writeups appear on team blogs (Shellphish, PPP, Maple Bacon, Blue Water, KAIST GoN) within 1-3 months.

Even if you do not compete, replaying CTF finals problems is one of the best ways to internalize current pwn tradecraft — see pwn-college-walkthrough-methodology and ctf-to-bug-bounty-transition.

Pwn2Own-adjacent talks

Some DC talks are extended write-ups of Pwn2Own / Pwnie-nominated bugs. Use them as the “director’s commentary” for pwn2own-2024-2025-research-roundup. Look especially for Tesla, ICS Pwn2Own Miami, and Mobile Pwn2Own Toronto retrospectives.

Defensive baseline

If you defend infrastructure, mine DEF CON for IR and detection content as much as offensive:

Map every applicable talk to ATT&CK techniques and update siem-detection-use-case-catalog.
Convert exploit chains to atomic tests via atomic-red-team-emulation-deep.
Update detection-engineering-pyramid-of-pain with new behavioral indicators (e.g., PKfail boot-time integrity checks, Entra audit log baselines).
Refresh cloud IR runbooks: cloud-ir-aws-cloudtrail, cloud-ir-azure-activity-log, cloud-ir-gcp-audit-logs, cloud-ir-k8s-audit-logs.
For OT environments, line up Village ICS talks against your asset inventory.

Workflow to study DEF CON output

A reproducible monthly review process that pays back compound interest:

Wait two to six weeks post-event. Most slides and a chunk of videos hit media.defcon.org and the DEFCONConference YouTube channel by late September.
Pull the official talk index. The DC32 / DC33 talks pages on defcon.org list abstracts, speakers, and tracks. Save as a CSV or markdown table.
Tag by domain. Web, mobile, cloud, hardware, AI, OT, automotive, satellite, IR. Use the same taxonomy as the rest of your notes.
Triage top 20. Rank by relevance to your day job / target portfolio. For each: watch the talk at 1.5x, grab slides, find the speaker’s GitHub.
Replicate one. Pick one talk per month and rebuild the lab in your home setup — see building-a-research-home-lab.
Patch-diff follow-ups. For talks that dropped 1-days, run one-day-from-patch-diff on the referenced CVEs.
Cross-link. Add <span class="wikilink wikilink-broken" title="Unresolved: wikilink">wikilink</span> references from your existing topic notes to the talk URL. This is how the knowledge compounds.
Track Villages separately. Each Village publishes its own materials, often on GitHub orgs (aerospacevillage, ICSVillage, BiohackingVillage, AIVillage). Subscribe.
Mirror media locally. Slides and code disappear; mirror to your private archive (respect licensing).
Feed your CTI loop. Update cti-collection-management with new threat actor TTPs disclosed at the con.

Reading order when time is short

If you have one weekend:

Watch the keynote and the closing ceremony.
Watch the top three main-track talks for your domain.
Skim AI Village summary thread on X / Mastodon / Bluesky.
Read three CTF finals writeups.
File three new notes in your knowledge base referencing the above.

References

DEF CON official media archive: https://media.defcon.org/
DEF CON 32 talks index: https://defcon.org/html/defcon-32/dc-32-speakers.html
DEF CON 33 talks index: https://defcon.org/html/defcon-33/dc-33-speakers.html
Binarly PKfail disclosure (presented at DC32): https://www.binarly.io/blog/pkfail-untrusted-platform-keys-undermine-secure-boot-on-uefi-ecosystem
Hack-a-Sat finals retrospective: https://hackasat.com/
DARPA AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) updates: https://aicyberchallenge.com/