ATLSECCON 2026

In my talk, “Carrier Pigeon - Decentralized Communication with LoRa”, I aim to educate others on the growing concerns associated with modern-day instant messaging and to inspire them to step out of their comfort zone and experiment with unconventional and often inconvenient forms of technology.

The talk is broken up into four main sections:

* The concerns associated with modern messaging protocols, including centralization, metadata collection, message scanning, and reliance on always-on infrastructure, as well as the reasons why someone may consider using an alternative form of communication.
* A high-level overview of how the LoRa protocol works, what makes it interesting, and why it's uniquely suited for low-bandwidth, long-range communication.
* A showcase of my passion project, Carrier Pigeon, and the hardware I pair with it, design decisions I've made along the way, and some of my ongoing experiments with drone-based message propagation.
* An overview of how I utilized LoRa alongside common modern day cryptographic practices to build a decentralized form of communication.

I strive to keep the topics in this talk relatively surface-level and easy to understand, with minimal assumptions about prior knowledge, making both the talk and the information within it approachable for people of all educational backgrounds.

I look forward to seeing you all there!