I'm sitting at the airport to leave DEFCON and regretted not participating this weekend. I can think of a few ways for a one-man team to compete effectively, mostly involving the GPU instances at EC2. While the competition is over, the files are still available, so I hope to poke at this idea this week and see how it goes.
It seems that the focus this year was pass phrases. Notice the final note I just added to the website. I should have realized this based on the hints provided at the end of the contest. Anyway, I gave an example on how to crack some.
