Drones, RF, and the Hacker Mindset with Luke Canfield

Luke Canfield came up the way a lot of hardware hackers do, the geeky kid in high school everyone came to when the school's computers broke, tinkering with Windows XP and war driving with homemade Yagi antennas built out of Pringles cans. That fascination with the hardware side never left him, and today he runs Reconnaissance Drone Consulting, teaching people about a threat surface most of the security world still isn't looking at.

Phillip and Luke met at KernelCon, and this conversation is a wide tour through the corners of security that live outside the usual enterprise conversation. They get into the resurgence of war driving and how a headless Kali Pi has replaced a car full of gear, why AI is reshaping RF and CTF competitions and what that means for people who still want to learn things manually, and Luke's real focus, drones as a multi-domain problem spanning the cyber, operational, and physical.

From there it opens up into the stuff that makes you rethink physical security entirely, the six-week drone iteration cycle coming out of Ukraine and how much of it ends up freely available online, why the cartels have run in-house drone design teams for over a decade, prison contraband as the biggest domestic misuse case, and the simple reason nobody looks up - as Luke puts it, humans evolved to avoid being eaten by big cats, not big birds.

He also shares his current build, an open source unmanned ground vehicle named Tortuga, made from two donated power wheelchairs, that's headed into Texas cattle pastures to spot parasite outbreaks with thermal imaging.

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Connect with Luke Canfield:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luke-a-canfield/ =========================

Connect with your host, Phillip Wylie:LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/phillipwylieX: https://x.com/PhillipWylieInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/phillipwylie