Interesting contest, but it seems that the organizers and participants might have overlooked that an active group of RC hobbyists completely reverse engineered the Syma X5C protocol and several other protocols for other popular toy drones already.
Holy smokes, what a detailed and informative write-up. Genuinely learned some high and low-level concepts, approaches, and reflections on the event. Glad I got to see this and appreciate the posting here.
"There were more those who were interested, but most of them decided not to participate when they found out that it was not about hacking Wi-Fi. Many people are afraid to take on something new and strange, and this keeps the Internet of Things secure."
I find this strange / interesting / amusing. I'm guessing the people who declined are the ones who would probably not get fare with hacking wifi either.
i don't know, a lot of folks show up to CTFs with skills to break conventional apps. Actual reverse engineering (especially something a little different like radio) takes a bit more creativity and effort.
It's impressive how much you can do with Gnu software defined radio by wiring functional blocks together. It used to take a rack of expensive equipment to tear down an arbitrary signal like that.
https://github.com/goebish/nrf24_multipro/tree/master/nRF24_...