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The first t2 conference, held in 2004 in Katajanokan kasino, Helsinki, Finland,[1] had some presentations in Finnish; however, starting in 2007, all presentations have been in English. The conference is always held in the fall and lasts two days, always on a consecutive Thursday and Friday.
| Nr. | Date | Venue |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2004-09-30 – 2004-09-31 | Katajanokan kasino, Helsinki, Finland |
| 2 | 2005-09-15 – 2005-09-16 | Hilton Helsinki Kalastajatorppa Hotel, Helsinki, Finland |
| 3 | 2006-09-28 – 2009-09-29 | Hilton Helsinki Kalastajatorppa Hotel, Helsinki, Finland |
| 4 | 2007-10-11 – 2007-10-12 | Hilton Helsinki Kalastajatorppa Hotel, Helsinki, Finland |
| 5 | 2008-10-16 – 2008-10-17 | Radisson SAS Royal Hotel, Helsinki, Finland |
| 6 | 2009-10-29 – 2009-10-30 | Radisson SAS Royal Hotel, Helsinki, Finland |
| 7 | 2010-10-28 – 2010-10-29 | Radisson SAS Royal Hotel, Helsinki, Finland |
t2'11 will take place in 2011-10-27 – 2011-10-28 in Helsinki, Finland.
The mission of t2 is to be an annual conference dedicated to those who are interested in the technical aspects of information security.[2] Since networking is an elemental part of the ideology of t2, it is always held in a relaxed and informal atmosphere.[3] The evening program gives the attendees a unique chance to chat with speakers in relaxed environment. For attendees' comments about t2, see this blog post by Dave Hartley. For speakers' comments about t2, see this blog post by Jani Kenttälä and this one by Ivan Krstić.
The conference was born at a time when there was no technically oriented and independent information security conference in Finland.[1] To guarantee the independent nature of the conference, t2 has the following rules:
All submitted presentations are reviewed by the t2 Advisory Board:[7]
t2 has had several presentations on hot information security topics that have made the news. In the 2010 keynote speech, Olli-Pekka Niemi and Antti Levomäki described the evasion research framework implemented in Stonesoft and demonstrated how poorly many security devices handled evasions. In 2008, Jack C. Louis and Robert Lee showcased attacks that rendered a remote system unavailable by exploiting TCP state table manipulation vulnerabilities using very low bandwidth. In the 2007 keynote speech, Hillar Aarelaid, the manager of CERT-EE analyzed the attacks and defense in the massive online attacks that were launched against Estonia in April and May 2007. In 2006, Harri Hursti gave the keynote speech on electronic voting.
The material in t2 presentations is not always publicly available. In t2'09, Mikko Hyppönen presented a case study into an investigation against an international malware writing group. The presentation, titled "Case m00p", was not open to the media and no presentation material was made available either. In t2'04, Grugq's presentation "Defeating Forensic Analysis on Unix File Systems" contained material that had never been presented on the North American continent simply "because anti-forensics scares the feds".[8]
Some t2 presentations have reflected the “from hacker to hacker” spirit especially well. In t2'10, Pwn2Own winner Nils demonstrated how to turn Google Android and Palm WebOS phones into bugging devices. In t2'09, Andrea Barisani demonstrated how to sniff keystrokes with lasers and voltmeters, and how to hijack SatNav Traffic Channel. In the same conference, Felix Leder and Tillmann Werner demonstrated techniques for botnet mitigation and takeover.
In addition to aforementioned, other well-known t2 speakers have been:
As the prices of information security conference tickets can be prohibitive, especially for young enthusiasts, the t2 Challenge was created to solve this problem by giving those considering attending the conference an opportunity to win tickets.[9][10][11][12] There are two winners each year: the one who is the first one to solve the Challenge, and the one with the most elegant solution. The Challenge was introduced in 2005, and in that year it was downloaded more than 10,000 times during the first 24 hours of its release.[13]
The Challenges from 2005 to 2008 were Reverse Engineering puzzles that had a hidden e-mail address the contestants had to discover.[14][15][16][17] In 2009, it was Incident Response, where again the goal was to find a hidden e-mail address but this time it was a multistage, with multiple ways to solve it.[18][19] The t2'10 Challenge was similar to t2'09's, and a scoreboard was introduced to display the results (almost) in real-time.[20][21]