I was invited to put on an hour-long workshop on cyber as part of a STEM weekend program for high school students. Unfortunately, I didn’t have access to a lot of resources to make this completely hands-on for them, but I had an interesting idea that I wanted to try out.  I presented them with the following scenario:

Our friends at Navy have given us a challenge.  They have vault, represented by the box I made, that contains something really valuable.  We currently have no way to get access, but our intel team has provided us with one piece of info:  there is some kind of industrial control system (ICS) that’s in charge of giant vault door.

I have the students walk me through how they’d go about finding more information about the structure.  Some tell me that they’d try to break the door down, but I inform them that the vault door is made of unobtanium and is resistant to any physical attack.

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I used a Beaglebone Black as my ICS machine and connected it to a small servo to control the opening of the door.  The vault is made of fiberboard.  Lots of credit goes to Ed Skoudis for the inspiration from his CyberCity project.

Read more about the workshop…