Feel (a little) Better: Brainy infoSec Research

agonizing the threat landscape?

Recently  I had a chance to see some of the smartest, up-and-coming minds in infoSec research present their projects over at Stanford last month at the Autumn Conference of TRUST (Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology. The pic is not them (it's a Rodin sculpture on the campus entitled Burghers of Calais which sounds like a pretentious fast food restaurant) but the figures embody the kind of angst I often feel about the ever-scarier threat landscape out there. 

But the good news is: the presentations gave me hope. There are some scary-smart people out there working on cool stuff like:

• Fault-Tolerant Distributed Reconnaissance 
• How to Verify Reference Monitors without Worrying about Data Structure Size
• Modeling Cyber-Insurance

Here's the conference program listing them all.

I was totally impressed. Though i could only digest about 1/3 of what they were saying, I could tell these were important, fundamental contributions and we were all fortunate to have amazing minds like this on our side. (Yeah, I know there are similar ones out there working for the bad guys but I'll put these guys up against any of them.) 


So...a little hope, anyway.