The Arcanum Gospel Badge

The Idea

Last year's Arcanum badge was a blinky badge with acrylic laser-engraved and UV printed.

So this year we asked a slightly courageous question: what if the badge wasn't just a board? What if it was a... book filled with cyber wisdom?

A Tribute, In Gospels & Glyphs

The whole thing is built around Jason and the wisdom he's poured into this community - years of cutting-edge research shared openly across the world, and a lot of hackers mentored along the way.

A tribute to his hacker wisdom, set down as gospels, bound into a book you wear around your neck. Cover art is a shout-out to Sean from Miscreants; the interior pages turn Jason's teachings into illuminated gospel text.

The Cybersecurity Wisdom

The Structure

A real book needs a cover and pages, so that's exactly what this is:

• The cover is a rigid PCB - 12×8 cm UV printed with cover art and carrying all the electronics on the back side.
• The pages are flexible - two flex circuits, 6×8 cm, with RGB LEDs *inside* the pages and glowing the page edges too!
• Bound together with a lot of careful hand soldering, and - zip ties.

The Blue-masking Trick

Instead of a solid soldermask, we developed an in-house semi-transparent blue masking that subtly reveals the intricate circuitry beneath - you can see the traces and the craft breathing through the cover.

UV Printing

Colour comes from UV printing rather than conventional silkscreen - unlimited colours, sharper and faster, and finished with a transparent protective coat for durability against heat and handling. Getting the gospel colours to pop took a few rounds of calibration before they were bright enough.

The Pages: Printed Circuit Film

The pages are the real wild part. They aren't ordinary flex PCB - they're Printed Circuit Film (PCF): Conductive traces screen-printed in silver ink onto a thin polyester film, cured, then protected and padded. Thin, light, and bendable - the same family of tech behind membrane keyboards.

We customised the stack into five layers: UV-printed art on polymer, the polymer itself, a PCF layer laser-cut for the LEDs, a polymer layer carrying the tracks and LEDs, and a vinyl backing. The payoff: pages that light up from their own edges.

Assembly

Each page connects to an I/O port, the ribbon cables run through the rigid cover, and everything gets soldered on the back so the front stays clean. As the saying goes: there's nothing a zip tie can't fix.

Let There Be Light

Because the PCF carries light through its edges, the pages don't just display the gospels - they glow them.

The Bookmark

There's a working bookmark too, with long pads so I could fine-tune the tightness during final assembly. And the lanyard isn't just a strap - there's a crypto puzzle printed on each side, which is the doorway into the CTF.

Ready!

Right down to the last minute - but it made it to DEF CON as a functioning, glowing book. A rigid cover, flexible light-up pages, a crypto CTF, and a soldermask you can see straight through. One of a kind, and built start to finish in our lab.