Pablo Trujillo's Hackbat "Hacking Tool" Gets a New Badge Variant for DEF CON 32
Losing NFC and sub-gigahertz support, the Hackbat Badge gains a new form factor — and a shift to the Espressif ESP32-C3.
FPGA designer and hobbyist "hacking tools" creator Pablo Trujillo has designed a variant of his Hackbat portable penetration testing device in badge form, released at the DEF CON 32 conference earlier this month: the Hackbat Badge.
"This board consists of a badge for the DEF CON 32 [conference]," Trujillo explains. "The board is based on the Espressif ESP32-C3. This microcontroller features a RISC-V single-core processor running at 160MHz, Wi-Fi (2.4GHz), Bluetooth, and a bunch of peripherals like SPI, I2C, [and] UART. The board can be programmed over the USB connector using either the Arduino IDE or the official Espressif IDE, the ESP-IDF."
The badge-board in question is, much like the Raspberry Pi RP2350-powered official DEF CON 32 badge, laid out a little like a handheld games console, with four switches to the left acting as a direction pad and two to the right as "fire buttons." Above these is a 1.3" OLED display, and above that are four addressable WS2812 RGB LEDs — located just below a lanyard hole.
The idea behind the badge is simple: to act as a variant of the original Hackbat, which Trujillo unveiled here on Hackster.io back in May. "In the cybersecurity field, engineers are always looking for vulnerabilities in order to fix them and prevent other actors could taking advantage of them," he explains. "The tools used by these engineers can be expensive and, on many occasions, the tools don't fit exactly with the requirements that engineers need. In this project, I want to present an open-source hardware platform with some tools used in cybersecurity, especially in pen testing."
The badge isn't a direct copy of the Hackbat, though: in addition to moving from the Raspberry Pi RP2040 to the Espressif ESP32-C3, the badge variant drops the Texas Instruments CC1101 sub-gigahertz transceiver, and the NXP PN532 Near Field Communication (NFC) module. It retains both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connectivity, though, making it usable as a portable tool for a range of pen-testing applications.
The badge's design files have been released on GitHub under an unspecified open-source license, with more information available on Hackaday.io; the original Hackbat can be found here on Hackster.io.