The DEF CON TRON Indie Badge Is Designed to Hack Other Badges

DEF CON 27 is right around the corner, and that means you’ve hopefully already made arrangements to purchase or build yourself a badge. Maybe it’s just something blinky, or maybe you’ve gone all out to build an elaborate and street cred-worthy creation. Whatever the case, you can bet you’re going to want to do some hacking at the conference. To do that, you’re going to need to bring some tools, and this TRON Indie Badge is badge-hacking tool in and of itself.

The DEF CON 27 TRON Indie Badge, created by Sodium_Hydrogen, recently launched on Kickstarter and has just exceeded its funding goal. Unlike most other indie badges, which are designed to be hackable, the TRON badge is intended to be an actual hacking tool. It’s designed to look like the in-computer gate from both the original Tron and Tron: Legacy. It, along with the Identity Disk Shitty Add-On (SAO), is back-lit with RGB LEDs that you can program for some cool animations. But, of course, the most interesting thing about the TRON badge is how it can help you hack.

To do that, Sodium_Hydrogen integrated a Dangerous Prototypes Bus Pirate into the TRON badge. The Bus Pirate is a hacking tool with a whole host of features to help you crack into just about anything with a microcontroller or IC. For instance, it can sniff out SPI or I2C traffic, or analyze logic. It can be used to program many different AVR microcontrollers, and even FPGA boards. Sodium_Hydrogen chose to use the Bus Pirate v3.6, instead of the newer v4, because it’s better supported and has more documentation. But it will certainly give you a lot of the tools you need to hack badges at DEF CON 27.

If you want your own TRON Indie Badge, the Kickstarter campaign is running until July 2nd. A single badge with the Identity Disk SAO will cost you $200, and will be available for pickup at DEF CON.