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DEF CON 29 - Richard Henderson - Old MacDonald Had a Barcode, E I E I CAR

DEFCONConference · 18.4K views · 2021-08-05 · 43:40

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Overview

A DEF CON 29 talk by Richard Henderson about encoding the EICAR antivirus test string into QR codes and barcodes and scanning them at real systems. Many systems that do not expect such input misbehave or collapse, including a parking garage system.

On Hacker News

HN commenters recommend it as an entertaining demonstration of how scanners and antivirus software fail on unexpected input.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2021–2026

Topics

Security & hacking
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eicarqr codesantivirusdef coninput handling

What people said

tetha · 2026-04 · Recommendation

Do have way too much fun with EICAR: [VIDEO] This guy put the EICAR test string into a barcode and started to scan it on various systems, with rather funny effects.

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Full_Clark · 2025-06 · Recommendation

There's a good DEFCON 29 presentation on this topic. [VIDEO] If you skip forward to 16m 33s you'll be treated to a lively streak of invective from the passenger of a car whose driver has just confirmed that feeding EICAR to a parking system prevents it from letting any vehicle past the barrier.

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jrockway · 2023-11 · Recommendation

None of this seems too terrible to handle. The title of the song can be an empty string, so use *string/Maybe string instead of string to distinguish between unset and "some idiot made the song literally untitled". I am surprised there are no songs that use characters only available in two different character sets, or are the same Chinese character repeated with multiple different writings (Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese). I suppose that some people are running into trouble by using CHARACTER VARYING(n) instead of TEXT in their database, but if you pick the most likely database for your local music player, then it doesn't matter. (sqlite doesn't care, basically.) The song that's named after a virus test signature is amusing. I guess encrypt your filenames and database so that the OS can't pry into the details. Since you hopefully didn't write your music player in C, there should be no way that a virus can affect your music player. (While I was researching this post, I found an interesting Defcon talk about what happens when you turn the EICAR virus signature into a QR code and scan it. [VIDEO] A lot of stuff breaks! I almost got forced into adding similar breakage. At work we make what is essentially a database, and we got acquired by A Large Company, which had to do a security audit of our software. One of the "security vulnerabilities" in our product was that we don't scan the data in the database for viruses. We pushed back to not do this, becaus

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Sources

Video by DEFCONConference, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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