RISCS Seminar on Practical Security: Ari Trachtenberg

The intent of the seminar is to focus on practical elements of security, including implementation, offensive and defensive approaches, and even physical security: the type of security that is typically represented in non-academic hacker conferences such as BLACKHAT and DEFCON. Such practical areas of security are currently poorly penetrated (no pun intended) by the academic community, and yet the academic world can provide a lot of needed guidance and fundamental thinking, in addition to getting some grounding in real-world challenges.

All elements of practical security are in scope for this seminar. Theoeretical topics (e.g. from cryptography or information theory circles) are also in scope if clearly tied to practical matters. For example, entropy-reducing attacks on current implementations of random-number generators are appropriate, whereas a novel cryptosystem predicated on a polynomial-time solution to the integer programming problem might not be (unless, of course, you provide the polynomial-time solution as well).