LayerOne 2026

LayerOne 2026 was a blast! We’d like to thank the many folks who created amazing contests, events, workshops, presentations, and more at this year’s event!

Thanks to all of this year’s speakers for giving fantastic talks! We’ll be posting videos of the talks soon.

• Adrian Novoa – RedTeam 2026: Initial Access in Modern Environments
• cesi0 – What Your Car Knows: Digital Forensics and Modern Infotainment Systems
• Eliad Kimhy – The History of Malware: 40 Years of Viruses, Worms, and Other Strange Creatures
• Jack Hooker & Erwin Karincic (Dollarhyde) – Hacking Drones for Fun and Knowledge
• jk – Hacking Doodleburg – Reverse Engineering Electronic Children’s Toy Firmware
• Joe Rozner – Vibes all the way Down
• Larry Suto – Hunting Rogue Autonomous Agents: A Field Guide to AI Threats the SOC Can’t See
• Mehmet Sencan – Pulverize Chips with a Squib in the Heatsink
• Merlin – Post-Quantum Cryptography with Python
• Mohsen Ahmadi – SPECTRA: Semantic Pattern Extraction for Scalable Malware Detection and Signature Automation
• Priyank Nigam – Trusted Senders and Untrusted Outcomes: Modern HTML Injection Exploitation
• Tobias Mueller – Busting Black Basta: Exploting Ransomware

Hardware Hacking Village

Thanks to ToD, T-Man, and Henry for providing soldering assistance all weekend. Thanks to Kody, Brandon, and Wolfgang of Retia.io for hosting soldering, WiFi, and Meshtastic workshops throughout the weekend!

Lockpicking Village

Thanks to yakmedic, JimyLongs, Matt Burrough, WillyCrash and Seattle Locksport for hosting this year’s Lockpicking Village!

Final standings for the lockpicking competition:

1. cyclops – 15 locks
2. martymar – 14 locks
3. ghriz – 13 locks

Congrats to the ~20 folks who completed the Impressioning Clinic in the village, and Holly for getting a fantastic time with impressioning. We heard Deviant also did alright in impressioning but not as good as datagram. Congrats to those two, as well.

RaiseMe Career Village

Thanks to Lori Barfield, John Sicklick, and all of the volunteers that provided presentations, consulting sessions, and assistance throughout the weekend. Thanks to the folks of DEF CON’s Maritime Hacking Village for contributing to the RaiseMe Village this year, as well!

Chillout Room

Thanks to Proxy and theoddtech for hosting a lovely collection of board games and space-themed pinball machines!

Capture the Flag

Thanks to Kybr, Panda, Hacksmith, Prok, Luis, Nathan, Elwood, Facundo, Y, JK, and the Qualcomm Cybersecurity team for creating challenges, running infrastructure, operations, testing, art and theming, and operations!

Final standings (top 10):

1. Layer 8 – 8145 pts
2. DC562 – 8055 pts
3. Psychoholics – 7955 pts
4. I0 – 5655 pts
5. blinkingthing – 4845 pts
6. Ack! Ack! Ack! – 2730 pts
7. Donut World – 2525 pts
8. Vikings of Valhalla – 2160 pts
9. GonePhishing – 1825 pts
10. ArDee – 1560 pts

Soldering Olympics

Thanks to m0zy of Pendula Labs for hosting this year’s Soldering Olympics event! All three boards were wonderful and gave attendees some great soldering and electronics challenges. Congrats to comrade for defending the Soldering Olympics title and congrats to eltair and aask for taking 2nd and 3rd!

Round 3:

1. comrade
2. eltair
3. aask

Round 2:

1. comrade
2. eltair
3. aask
4. mfput
5. TheIntern

Round 1:

1. The Intern
2. comrade
3. nate
4. aask
5. krs
6. eltair
7. Dementia
8. kybr
9. mfput
10. martymar

Demo Party

Thanks to all those who entered this year’s party! ANSI final results are listed on https://demozoo.org/parties/5596/! Congrats to The Knight, abstrakt, and tainted. Shoutouts to Albert, wyattari, sicp, cesi0, mmca, merlin, JK, and dg for their entries to this year’s party.

Hebocon Robot Battles

Congratulations to the fearless competitors in this year’s Hebocon Robot Battles! Thanks dementia and annaglyph for hosting this year’s event.

Final standings (top 3):

1. T-Man – “Pip Petals Princess of Pain”
2. LaserRay – “more caffeine”
3. Merg – “DG’s Mom”

Tamper-Evident King of the Hill

Thanks to morfir and morfir 2.0 for hosting this event!

Hack My VM!

Thanks to Vix, Stephen Jr, Gia, and Alex of Cal State Fullerton’s Offensive Security Society (OSS). Check them out at https://www.osscsuf.org/

Bricks in the Air

Thanks to Gurney for hosting the Bricks in the Air event this year! Check them out at DEF CON’s Aerospace Village!

FAST Farm Store

Thanks to the folks of Cal Poly Pomona’s FAST for hosting the Farm Store event this year!

Amateur Radio Testing

Thanks to JN and all of the testing VEs for their hard work prepping and conducting testing! We had 7 people pass their exams! Check out the #radio channel on our Discord if you have any questions!

Moltshit

Thanks to the demented minds of duald and zhoratrope for hosting!

Thanks to the many volunteers that make the machinery of LayerOne go. Thanks to Zero De Vide, Myst, Alli, cesi0, jk, Joe Rozner, phaasit, T-Man, Henry, ToD, morfir, holly, riverside, JN, Todd, stderr, mmca, charliex, KRS, and datagram.

Thanks to KRS, mmca, and charliex for their awesome badge design! This year’s badge was a three button keyboard with all the blinkies and a lovely self-printed UV resin artwork layer. Thanks to riverside and Holly for helping to fix an electrical issue with all the badges by hand!

• Shirt art by Eric DeSantis – ericdesantis.myportfolio.com
• Program layout and artwork by Alli
• Badge art by charliex

LayerOne 2026 starts tomorrow! We hope you’re all ready for a full weekend of fun, friends, and hacks! For those onsite later this afternoon, come by the bar in the lobby to see old friends and make some new ones.

For you last minute folks, you can still register online with the door price at https://www.layerone.org/registration/

Sincerely,
The LayerOne Staff

This year’s Saturday Banquet and Party will be a gigantic Game Night! We specifically tasked the board game sommeliers of Los Angeles to give us their best-of list. They didn’t disappoint – we have an amazing selection of over 100 games to play! From classic favorites to the newest and craziest, come eat great food and play great games at this years’ LayerOne Saturday Party!

We hope you’re able to join us for an action packed weekend at LayerOne 2026! Get your tickets now over at the Registration page!

Sincerely,
The LayerOne Staff

This year’s Hardware Hacking Village contains a huge amount of content for all your electronics and blinky needs! Which events are you most looking forward to?

Our friends at Pendula Labs are one again hosting the beloved Soldering Olympics contest! Challenge yourself to solder an immaculate board and ratchet up the difficult as the levels progress. The Soldering Olympics is suitable for beginners and pros alike – don’t worry – the first level is super easy : )!

The fine folks at Retia.io are once again holding it down in the HHV and providing a variety of hands-on workshops to learn about soldering, meshtastic, WiFi networking, and more! Check out their schedule on the Hardware Hacking Village page. You can reserve your spot in the workshops by registering here.

Retia.io is also hosting a “DeFlockathon” contest, pitting would-be hackers against the dreaded surveillance systems of some Orwellian nightmare the vicious Martian invaders.

The lovely M, charliex, and KRS have cooked up another fun badge for you to play with for this year’s event. The HHV will have soldering and rework stations set up for those that was to tinker with their badge, as well as volunteers on-hand to help even the most beginner among you learn about surface mount soldering and electronics. JK has also graciously donated a bunch of Mr. Pencil devices to the HHV this year to accompany his talk on hardware and software hacking the Mr. Pencil device.

Crush your opponents. Hopefully. Build the best worst robot you can in this tour de force robot battle! Full details on the HeboCon Robot Battles page.

New for 2026! Learn about aerospace security in a hands-on event that pits you against the definitely secure subsystems of a LEGO aircraft. More details on the Bricks In The Air page!

You’re given specific hardware with any number of restrictions; code size, available memory, processor speed. Your goal is to output audio and video that pushes the limits of what is considered possible with such limited hardware. More information available on the Demo Party page.

Sincerely,
The LayerOne Staff

LayerOne 2026 is coming up next weekend! The Martian fleet is on their way and ready to make contact with the brave hackers of Los Angeles. Join us for this year’s awesome Mars Attacks themed conference! We hope you’re excited for all the awesome talks, villages, contests, and events the weekend has to offer! Check it out:
https://www.layerone.org/schedule/
https://www.layerone.org/speakers/
https://www.layerone.org/events/
https://www.layerone.org/registration/

Sincerely,
The LayerOne Staff