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WORLDCOMP'11 Keynote Lecture - Prof. Eugene H. Spafford
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The Nature of Cyber Security
Prof. Eugene H. Spafford, Ph.D. Executive Director, CERIAS (Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security) Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, CERIAS, USA  Download Slide Presentation for This KeynoteDate: July 18, 2011 Time: 09:50 - 10:45am Location: The Monte Carlo Theater |
There is an on-going discussion about establishing a scientific basis for
cyber security. Efforts to date have often been ad hoc and conducted without
any apparent insight into deeper formalisms. The result has been repeated
system failures, and a steady progression of new attacks and compromises.
A solution, then, would seem to be to identify underlying scientific
principles of cyber security, articulate them, and then employ them in the
design and construction of future systems. This is at the core of several
recent government programs and initiatives.
But the question that has not been asked is if "cyber security": is really
the correct abstraction for analysis. There are some hints that perhaps it
is not, and that some other approach is really more appropriate for
systematic study - perhaps one we have yet to define.
In this talk I will provide some overview of the challenges in cyber
security, the arguments being made for exploration and definition of a
science of cyber security, and also some of the counterarguments. The goal
of the presentation is not to convince the audience that either viewpoint is
necessarily correct, but to suggest that perhaps there is sufficient doubt
that we should carefully examine some of our assumptions about the field.
Eugene Howard Spafford is a Professor in the Purdue University. He is
historically significant Internet figure, he is renowned for first analyzing
the Morris Worm, one of the earliest computer worms, and his prominent role
in the Usenet backbone cabal. Spafford was a member of the President's
Information Technology Advisory Committee 2003-2005,[2] has been an advisor
to the National Science Foundation (NSF), and serves as an advisor to over a
dozen other government agencies and major corporations.
Spafford attended State University of New York at Brockport for three years
and completed his B.A. with a double major in mathematics and computer
science in that time. He then attended the School of Information and
Computer Sciences (now the College of Computing) at the Georgia Institute of
Technology. He received his M.S. in 1981, and Ph.D. in 1986 for his design
and implementation of the original Clouds distributed operating system
kernel.
During the early formative years of the Internet, Spafford made significant
contributions to establishing semi-formal processes to organize and manage
Usenet, then the primary channel of communication between users, as well as
being influential in defining the standards of behavior governing its use.
