Computer Security: Cryptography and authentication (2/4)

About

Remi Mollon studied computer security at University and he first worked on Grids, with the EGEE project, for a French Bioinformatics institute. Information security being crucial in that field, he developed an encrypted file management system on top of Grid middleware, and he contributed in integrating legacy applications with Grids. Then, he was hired by CERN as a Grid Data Management developer, and he joined the Grid Operational Security Coordination Team. Remi has now moved to CERN Computer Security Team. Remi is involved in the daily security operations, in addition to be responsible to design Team's computer infrastructure, and to participate to several projects, like multi-factor authentication at CERN.

With the prevalence of modern information technologies and its increasing integration into our daily live, digital systems become more and more playground for evil people. While in the past, attacks were driven by fame& kudos, nowadays money is the motivating factor. Just the recent months have shown several successful attacks against e.g. Sony, PBS, UNESCO, RSAsecurity, Citibank, and others. Credit card information of hundreds of thousands of people got exposed. Affected companies not only lost their assets and data, also their reputation has suffered. Thus, proper computer security measures are essential. Without question, security must even more become an inherent ingredient when developing, deploying, and operating applications, web sites, and computing services. These lectures shall give an overview of general computer and information security, subsequently focus on the problems of creating secure applications and computer services, highlight the importance of security operations (i.e. prevention, protection, detection and response), delve into the specifies of securing the critical infrastructure and their digital control systems as well as securing cloud and distributed computing, and discuss the impact of so-called Web 2.0 technologies to security…