Short Review of  the
Detection of Intrusions, Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment Conference 2006,
Berlin, Germany
July 13-16, 2006

by Sven Dietrich, Carnegie Mellon University
9/15/2006

The Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA) 2006 conference took place in Berlin July 13-14, 2006 at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities conference center right in the middle of Berlin. It was attended by 80 or so participants (including researchers, practitioners, and students) from all over the world, at one of the busiest times for Berlin: between the Soccer World Cup and the Love Parade.

There was a full program for two days, covering topics in Code Analysis, Intrusion Detection, Threat Protection and Response, Malware and Forensics, Deployment Scenarios, and Best Practices. Roland Bueschkes was the Program Chair and Pavel Laskov was the General Chair.

The program is available at http://www.gi-ev.de/fachbereiche/sicherheit/fg/sidar/dimva/dimva2006/ together with the papers (eventually), the slides, and some photos of the presenters. This includes the keynote speeches by John McHugh (Dalhousie University), "Reaction: The Internet security paradox," and Michael Behringer (Cisco Systems), "Security Management: 5000 events/sec, half an engineer and automation discouraged." On Thursday night, the dinner speech during the boat trip on the river Spree and the adjacent canals was given by Stefan Grosse, German Federal Ministry of the Interior. There was a rump session held on Friday with a mix of humorous and serious short talks, chaired by yours truly. Those who were there might still be a bit puzzled, even though we cleared up the mystery... No, folks, OntoSec is not for real, no matter how realistic it may have sounded. Really. There was a Capture the Flag contest running in parallel during the second day of the conference, entitled CIPHER2 (yes, we know, slight name conflict here). For more info, please visit: http://cipher-ctf.org/cipher2.php Conference attendees were able to follow the CIPHER2 scoreboard live during the presentations in the conference room up to the conclusion on Friday afternoon.

All in all, it was a successful conference, with a lot of hallway track opportunities, whether the hallway was on solid ground or moving through locks while ducking before the low bridges.

We hope to see your submissions to DIMVA 2007 (Call for Papers is at http://www.dimva.org/dimva2007/ or use http://www.icir.org/robin/dimva07 for now) and your participation in Lucerne, Switzerland, July 12-13, 2007. Program Chair will be Robin Sommer (LBNL/ICSI) and General Chair will be Bernhard Haemmerli (HTA Lucerne).

See you in Lucerne!