Earlier this month, we highlighted an intriguing new piece of hardware capable of providing secure and anonymous Wi-Fi connectivity within a 2.5 mile radius. The brainchild of researcher Ben Caudill, the device, dubbed ProxyHam, was scheduled to be officially introduced at Def Con in Las Vegas early next month.
But then something funny happened.
Caudill’s talk was abruptly cancelled under extremely mysterious circumstances over the weekend.
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“Caudill had planned a talk at DEF CON 23 centered on ProxyHam, which would’ve included a demonstration and the release of full hardware schematics, as well as source code,” CSO writes. “While everything needed to develop a device would’ve been offered, pre-configured units were planned for sale at a cost of $200.”
Caudill himself has been strangely quiet about the circumstances surrounding his cancelled talk. All we know at this point is that Caudill won’t be speaking and pervious plans to sell working units and release the device’s source code have completely been scrapped.
As one might expect, some now believe that Caudill’s talk was abruptly taken off the docket at the behest of the U.S. Government.
“It isn’t perfect, but a tool like Proxyham,” CSO adds, “when combined with Tor and other VPN services, would be powerful. Such a combination would make tracking dissidents or whistleblowers (even with custom malware or tools from the likes of Hacking Team) increasingly difficult the more that ProxyHam was developed.”
When reached for comment by Business Insider, Caudill was expectedly mum, noting that he wasn’t at liberty to “disclose any further information on Proxyham, the Defcon talk on anonymity and privacy, or the cancellation of the research.”
Via Twitter, Caudill would only confirm that ProxyHam was not sold to any third party. There are also these few tweets which are worth highlighting.
Effective immediately, we are halting further dev on #proxyham and will not be releasing any further details or source for the device
— Rhino Security Labs (@RhinoSecurity) July 10, 2015
Existing #proxyham units will be disposed of and no longer be made available at @_defcon_
— Rhino Security Labs (@RhinoSecurity) July 10, 2015
This tweet, though, about sums it up.
@RhinoSecurity @_defcon_ Defcon is not Defcon unless somebody gets their talk cancelled by an unknown authority
— Lazlo Holyfield (@Lazl0Holyfield) July 13, 2015
