June TASK: Cyber Security Horror Show / CAN Bus for Car Nerds and Security People Who Should Know Better
Live and in-person at TMU + Live-Streamed on Discord
Date: Wednesday, June 25
Time: 6:00 PM
In-Person Location: DCC 208 Classroom at TMU's Daphne Cockwell Health Sciences Complex - 288 Church Street
Registration: Not required
Live-Stream: Although TASK is always best in-person, we will steam live again on Discord @ https://discord.gg/aXfY76xgVJ.
Topic: Cyber security horror show: The security implications of network cards
Speaker: Deven Boutin-Lacelle
To present the practical "theoretical" attacks that use network cards and what you could do if you compromise a network card's firmware and how you might go about doing it. In addition to why that might be important to you and your systems and how you should address it and detect it.
Deven Boutin-Lacelle is an independent cybersecurity professional. He architects secure high performance distributed Linux systems, and has been doing cyber security and IT since the age of 8. Having graduated from Seneca in computer networking, and is currently in their cyber security program. In addition he holds other IT and cybersecurity certifications and has firsthand experience dealing with cyber security threats.
Topic: CAN Bus for Car Nerds and Security People Who Should Know Better
Speaker: Brian Bourne
In the world of custom car builds, knowing how to turn a wrench is only half the battle — the other half is figuring out why your 700hp engine swap won’t talk to the dash, the AC won’t work, and the wipers have developed a mind of their own. The answer, nine times out of ten? The CAN (Controller Area Network) bus.
So why are we talking about this at TASK? Because reverse-engineering CAN is shockingly familiar territory: wire-level protocols, undocumented messages, weird vendor quirks, and the occasional “why did they do it that way?” moment. Sound familiar?
This session is a crash course in CAN for people who know what a packet sniffer is, even if they’ve never built a drift car. We’ll cover:
What CAN bus is and how it works (without turning it into an EE lecture)
How to reverse-engineer vehicle signals with tools like SavvyCAN, cansniffer, and your favorite logic analyzer
Real-world hacks like tricking factory gauges into working with aftermarket ECUs
Making analog sensors speak fluent CAN
Getting digital clusters, body control modules, and even climate systems to play nice
And when all else fails? We’ll talk about workarounds, black-boxing, and why sometimes, the answer really is “just cut the wire.”
Whether you're doing an EV swap, dropping a Hellcat into a 1970s pickup, or just want to understand how thieves steal F-150s by hotwiring the headlight — this session is for you.
Brian Bourne has a long history in enterprise IT and cybersecurity — one he’s been trying (unsuccessfully) to leave behind. These days he builds race cars and electric vehicles, only to find himself reverse-engineering CAN bus signals and writing scripts in much greasier environments, occasionally getting his tan from the welder. He’s still figuring out what he wants to be when he grows up.
We look forward to see you all there!
The TASK Steering Committee