I don’t go to a lot of information security cons. I’ve been to all the ShmooCons (they’re local, after all), and to DEFCON 3 times (plus a couple of BlackHats back when the company was paying for the trip).  So, really, like 2 a year. That was pretty much my world – and I knew there were a couple others, but didn’t really pay much attention.

But in the past year, since I’ve started following a lot of security people on Twitter, I’ve realized just how many cons there are. This weekend alone there are three – two 1-day cons, and a 2-day con.  Crazy!

These are pretty small cons, but I realized a long time ago (when ShmooCon was still pretty small) how quickly one can be overwhelmed by all the talks in the schedule. So I started printing up little pocket-sized cards with the entire schedule – then I’d laminate them and give them to all my co-workers attending the con with me. Really made figuring out where to go next much easier.

Last summer, I got an iPhone, just a few weeks before DEFCON. I’d already realized that DEFCON was much too big to fit on a single 3x5 card. Then it hit me – I’ll make a little web app for it, and use my phone! So I rushed something together, got it working more-or-less well, and asked a couple folks to check it out. I also told Dark Tangent about it, who told me that a native iPhone app was coming out, too.

Right after DEFCON, I started thinking about ways that we can make the phone-based scheduling system better. and one of the first thoughts was that it needed to be conference-independent. It had to support multiple cons, and not be simply re-written each time. I got in touch with the developers of the iPhone DEFCON app, and ever since we’ve been working on a solution to this problem.

We call it Khan Fu.

So far, it’s only a web app, but we think it’s pretty easy to use, and reasonably flexible. It’s been used for ShmooCon, BSidesSF, and this weekend, THOTCON, QuahogCon, and BSidesBoston [BSides data should be loaded later this evening]. It’s even got a snazzy HTML-5 enabled offline mode, for when your 3G connection goes all wonky.

So, if you’re going to Quahog or BSidesBOS (THOTCON is more than halfway done already), check it out! http://www.khanfu.com.