2026-09-10 –, Großer Saal
Hacking the Potensic Atom 2 consumer drone, including a full walkthrough of the process of disassembling the drone, dumping the firmware, reverse-engineering its long-range RF control protocol, finding vulnerabilities, and exploiting them to take over the drone remotely.
This talk tracks an IT security researcher’s journey through the process of disassembling, dumping and exploiting the Potensic Atom 2 consumer drone. We’ll follow the full lifecycle of a hardware exploit: Starting with low-level chip identification and flash desoldering, we make a detour into recovering heavily corrupted flash firmware by reverse engineering error correction codes.
From there, we pivot to the software, reverse-engineering the binary firmware to uncover hidden backdoors in the drone's control protocol. Ending with a presentation of a custom exploit designed to hijack the drone and gain full root access. Whether you're interested in hardware RE or binary exploitation, this is a fast-paced look at every stage of the IoT research process.
Tim Schmidt is an IT security researcher and penetration tester at Neodyme AG with over a decade of experience in competitive Capture The Flag (CTF) environments. While his core expertise lies in web and application penetration testing, his technical background also spans IoT and embedded reverse engineering and smart contract audits. An avid builder, Tim frequently develops software projects and custom IoT appliances from scratch in his free time.
As an educator, he has delivered specialized trainings on modern authentication technologies and cryptographic attacks for corporate clients in Germany and at international security conferences, such as HITB Amsterdam.