News Bits

Four items from the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) at Purdue University:

• Cipher readers may be interested in the report at this link:      www.cerias.purdue.edu/events/summit_4q2000.php

From that page:

Extraordinary changes in the way we do business and lead our lives in the ever-connected world of the future will create tremendous security challenges. These challenges will be shaped by many of today's emerging trends: the rapid acceleration of network speed, connectivity and the overall number of devices; the removal of the human element from many everyday transactions; and easier and cheaper collection of public and private information. More than ever before, we will demand security solutions that enable businesses to thrive and private information to be protected. Accenture has just released the Security Call to Action and executive summary, from the 15 security experts who participated in the CERIAS Security Vision Roundtable. This two-day event, jointly sponsored by Accenture and the Purdue University CERIAS (Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security), brought together both industry pioneers as well as information security leaders experts at some of the largest and most influential companies in the world. The report includes a Call to Action and a list of the key trends affecting security over the next decade. The bottom-line is that doing security right requires the greater community of business leaders, technologists, educators and political leaders to look seriously at this Call to Action and to commit resources and energy to help lead us all to a more secure world. Accenture is the new name for Andersen Consulting as of January 1, 2001.

• This is a reminder that the deadline for registering for the Symposium on Requirements Engineering for Information Security (SREIS, March5-6, 2001) in approaching.  See www.sreis.org/ for details.  
  
  The National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Security Agency, under the auspices of the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP), will host an important high-level Government-Industry IT Security Forum on March 7, 2001 at the IUPUI Conference Center in Indianapolis, Indiana. Key leaders from government and industry will discuss critical issues relating to IT security requirements for COTS products, security testing and evaluation processes, insurance and auditing concerns, and research and development trends. There will also be a groundbreaking symposium on security requirements engineering hosted by Purdue University on March 5th and 6th at the same facility. Seating will be limited to the first 400 registrants so you are encouraged to register as early as possible. Details on the IT Security Forum can be found on the attached announcement or by visiting the NIAP web site at niap.nist.gov and following the links from the lead news article on the home page. 

• Professor Eugene Spafford's remarks made upon receiving the National Computer System Security Award at NISSC (October 2000) can be found at www.cerias.purdue.edu/homes/spaf/ncssa.html.  Great reading!  And congratulations to Spaf for recently being named an IEEE Fellow.

• The next CERIAS on-line newsletter "About CERIAS" will be coming out within a few weeks.  Visit www.cerias.purdue.edu/newsletter/ to subscribe.

Correspondence from Janos A. Csirik:

In contrast with GSM, the 3GPP organisation (responsible for 3G wireless phone standards) is making all of its documents public.  However, the way in which these documents are made public is unlikely to result in immediate gratification for those who would just like to go in and look at the crypto algorithms.  For that reason, I have undertaken to construct a Web page to help cryptographers learn about and study the crypto algorithms for 3G wireless phones.  I believe that the algorithms will receive much more and better scrutiny if it is easy to find them (and other 3G documents that are relevant to them). This page can be found at www.research.att.com/~janos/3gpp.html

Thank you for your attention!

Janos A. Csirik
janos@research.att.com

News Bits contains correspondence, interesting links, non-commercial announcements and other snippets of information the editor thought that Cipher readers might find interesting.  And, like a UCITA protected product, by reading the above page you have already agreed to not hold the editor accountable for the correctness of its contents.