Dear Readers,
When I read the news media these days, I sense a lack of urgency about computer security. There's less panic about foreign powers exerting social media control over children, strangely few articles about ransomware (is it losing its glamour?), and even cryptocurrencies, despite being embraced by the SEC, are much less interesting than ... Generative AI!
Will ChatGPT be our new IT department? Will it do the necessary configuration to keep our data safe? Or will it contribute all our information to the greater good of training data for better AI? Ever bigger, ever better? How will an AI-based guardian distinguish protection from attack?
Fortunately, we have a large research community to turn to, for pro and con, as the juggernaut moves on. There are thousands of papers in the conferences each year, and we urge you to participate, to learn and to inform. The TCSP sponsors several of these conferences and their associated workshops. The "season" begins in April with "Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning" and continues with two events in May (Hardware Oriented Security and Trust; Security and Privacy) two events in July (Computer Security Foundations; European Security and Privacy) and winds up with Secure Development in October. There are, of course, a horde of other conferences throughout the year. Become part of the community, help to define the technology for a secure computer future.
A Song for the New Year
Should olden DDoS be forgot
And never spray again?
Should auld rowhammer be forgot
Like blue-boxed POTS phone lines?
For hacks of yore, with bits,
For hacks of yore,
We'll tak our blockchains to the cloud
Bitcoin to be mined.
And surely ye'll get a checkpoint saved,
And surely I'll save mine
And we'll tak a backup to the cloud,
Restore from auld lang syne.
With apologies to the entire history of Scottish literature,