Manufacturing Hardware Implants from Idea to Mass Production: A Hacker's Journey

The presentation discusses the journey of developing and mass-producing two hacking toys, WHID Injector and WHID Elite, and the challenges faced during the process. The speaker aims to motivate hackers to share their ideas with the community and give back without making a profit.

• The speaker shares the journey of developing and mass-producing two hacking toys, WHID Injector and WHID Elite.
• The speaker faced challenges during the process, such as lack of time, technical limitations, and failures.
• The speaker aims to motivate hackers to share their ideas with the community and give back without making a profit.
• The speaker provides tips on how to bring an idea to life, such as creating a napkin sketch, validating the idea, and finding a manufacturer.
• The speaker emphasizes the importance of persistence and protecting intellectual property.
• The speaker encourages hackers to follow their example and start similar not-for-profit projects.

The speaker shares an anecdote about forgetting to expose the interrupt pins for conducting radio attacks and extending the USB pins during the design of the first revision of WHID Elite, which resulted in having to heavily modify the design.

This presentation wants to be a motivational talk for all those hackers out there that always wanted to share some cool hacking devices with the community but didn't know how to deal with R&D, Quality Assurance, and Mass Production. In this talk, I will be presenting the entire life-cycle of a couple of hacking toys I developed: WHID Injector & WHID Elite. From their inception to release in production, passing through some blockers and failures I encountered during the journey.Why is this topic interesting you ask… Easy! Both R&D processes that I used were not backed by any crowdsourcing fund and the sale of these devices is not going in any form to me. I am just doing this as hobby, fun and (most importantly) I believe in giving back something to the InfoSec community without making any profit out of it.What about listening to how I did it and then trying yourself? There will also be examples of other hackers, inspired by my adventure who followed my example and started similar not-for-profit projects.