Presented by

  • Geoffrey Huntley

    Geoffrey Huntley
    @geoffreyhuntley
    https://ghuntley.com

    Geoff is a software engineer who lives a minimalist lifestyle in a van that is slowly working its way around Australia. You may know of him from his work of reverse engineering the COVIDSafe application.

Abstract

COVIDSafe was a digital contact tracing app announced by the Australian Government on 14 April 2020 to help combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but the problem is it didn't work and never would because it wasn't fit for purpose because Bluetooth was being misused. Join Geoff for a recap of what went wrong and have your popcorn ready cause in the midst of a cyber scare, the Australian Government accidentally enabled permanent tracking of people even after they had uninstalled the COVIDSafe application and accidentally enabled remote control of mobile phones whilst it was installed... Geoff is an open-source software engineer who formed a community of researchers around digital contact tracing, and their work earned them the LinuxConf Australia 2020 community recognition award. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VR73bJxX7jM LA Archive: http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/everythingopen/2023/clarendon_auditorium/Wednesday/COVIDSafe_Australias_digital_contact_tracing_failure.webm