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Frame from DEF CON 29 - Richard Henderson - Old MacDonald Had a Barcode, E I E I CAR Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

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

24 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
4 HN users recommended this talk4 months2021–2026 score 4
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

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

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.

“This guy put the EICAR test string into a barcode and started to scan it on various systems, with rather funny effects.” (HN, 2026)

4 recommendations · 2 citations · Talks · intermediate

6 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@jrockway Nov 2023 Recommends
on HN thread Horrible edge cases to consider when dealing with music (2022)
Read more
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. [this 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
Talk on what breaks when scanning an EICAR QR code.
@Full_Clark Jun 2025 Recommends
on HN thread Nitrogen Triiodide (2016)
There's a good DEFCON 29 presentation on this topic. [this 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.
Good DEF CON talk; parking system demo at 16m33s.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@fortran77 Mar 2022 Cites it
on HN thread Gas pumps happen to be about as insecure as your typical router
You can shut down all sorts of things with the EICAR string encoded as a QR code. See: [link] and this video [this video] where all the gates at a parking garage are rendered inoperable because someone scanned a QR code that encoded EICAR
Parking garage gates disabled by an EICAR QR code.

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