In cryptographic and security circles, the "evil maid" problem describes a class of attacks in which a piece of unguarded hardware, is tampered with by someone who gains physical access to it: for example, a hotel chambermaid who can access your laptop while you're out of the room.

At Defcon, Tencent's Wu HuiYu and Qian Wenxiang presented Breaking Smart Speakers: We are Listening to You, detailing their work in successfully exploiting an Amazon Alexa speaker, albeit in a very difficult-to-achieve fashion.

Saleem Rashid is a 15 year old self-taught British programmer who discovered a fatal defect in the Ledger Nano S, an offline cryptocurrency wallet that is marketed as being "tamper-proof."

Charlie Miller made headlines in 2015 as part of the team that showed it was possible to remote-drive a Jeep Cherokee over the internet, triggering a 1.4 million vehicle recall; now, he's just quit a job at Uber where he was working on security for future self-driving taxis, and he's not optimistic about the future of this important task.

Exiled NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and legendary hardware hacker Andrew bunnie" Huang have published a paper detailing their new "introspection engine" for the Iphone, an external hardware case that clips over the phone and probes its internal components with a miniature oscilloscope that reads all the radio traffic in and out of the device to see whether malicious software is secretly keeping the radio on after you put it in airplane mode.