Inside North Korea’s Underground Tech Resistance: How Smugglers, Defectors, and Technologists Are Outmaneuvering the World’s Most Locked-Down Information System
This talk provides a layer-by-layer technical breakdown of North Korea’s civilian information-control system – covering custom Android handsets with mandatory state-signed APKs, a screenshot-based surveillance daemon called TraceViewer, steganographic file watermarking in Red Star OS, and a sealed national intranet with zero Internet access. The talk demonstrates how North Korean citizens and a network of defectors and technologists are actively circumventing it using sneakernets, smuggled phones, and purpose-built tools. The talk concludes with a structured call to action for the security community, presenting open engineering challenges in obfuscation, firmware exploitation, air-gapped deployment, embedded systems, and more that map directly to skills common among HOPE attendees, grounded throughout in tools that have been built, tested with defectors, and deployed through Liberty in North Korea’s underground network.
Friday 1900 Grand Ballroom