[LUG] Talk in London of possible interest to list members

[Adrian Midgley <akm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't think I shall get there, but it is likely to be 
interesting.
Organised by among others the London LUG - LONIX


                 "Should Security Mechanisms be Secret?"

                              Ross Anderson

                  6pm (tea) for 6.40pm, Tue 11 Feb 2003

             A free-entry talk at City University, London EC1

     Please see  http://www.lonix.org.uk  to register for 
attendance
        and to get information about travel and arrival procedure

     For a web notice for this talk see 
http://acmbc.soi.city.ac.uk/


  Open-source and free software advocates argue that their code 
is more
  secure, because vulnerabilities are easier to find and fix. 
Microsoft
  argues that this just makes things easier for the attackers; 
their
  latest anti-trust settlement makes them share the design of 
interfaces
  and protocols - except where security is involved.  This 
debate goes
  back to the nineteenth century, when people argued about 
whether it
  was proper to write books about things like locksmithing and 
cipher
  systems. And the excuse `I can't tell you because of security' 
is not
  restricted to the software industry.
  
  In this talk I will present a surprising new result. I will 
show that,
  under the standard assumptions used by the reliability 
modelling
  community, the open and closed approaches are equivalent. 
Opening a
  system to public inspection helps attack and defence equally.
  
  This means that a practical decision on whether to keep the 
design of
  a system secret, or to open it to public inspection, will 
depend on
  the extent to which it departs from standard assumptions about 
the
  statistics of bugs, and on implementation issues such as the 
rate at
  which bug fixes are produced and applied.

  The audience is likly to reflect a wide range of relevant 
interests
  and will not need to understand advanced mathematics.

 For a related paper see 
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/toulouse.pdf


Ross Anderson (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14) is Reader in
Security Engineering and leader of the security group in the
University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.  His recent 
textbook,
"Security Engineering - A Guide to Building Dependable 
Distributed
Systems" (Wiley 2001) has received widespread acclaim.

Ross also chairs the Foundation for Information Policy Research 
and
is a leading activist in defending public information rights in a
wide range of areas, especially cryptography and copyright law.
The Foundation recently had a key influence on amending the 
Export
Bill to avoid importing the US ban on publishing cryptographic
source code.  Also of recent note is Ross' Palladium FAQ opposing
the Intel/Microsoft plan to embed copyright policing in PC 
hardware.


Organised by the Centre for Software Reliability at City 
University,
ACM British Chapter, LONIX (London Linux User Group), BCS 
Networks
Specialist Group, IEEE Computer Chapter (UK and Republic of 
Ireland).
Local organiser:  David Dodson, dcd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx, tel 
020-7040-8445.

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