CRYPTOmeet 2008, Dec 19th 2008.
In the era of communication revolution, though everyone is just a click away, the aura that gets developed by personal interaction cannot be replaced by electronic media. CRYTOcrats recently had its first CRYPTOmeet. The idea behind CRYPTOmeet was to bring together all the red hat cryptographers from Pune and areas around and have face to face interaction. For this, CRYPTOcrats in the city and some of the Pune’s who’s who in security field gathered together for a lively session touching various aspects of security and cryptography on the eve of 19th Dec 2008. The evening featured a panel discussion on the “Security, Cryptography and Future Trends” and an overview of the journey while implementing company wide security systems.This note summarizes the discussion from the event and musings on the issues put forth during the panel discussion and presentations.
Amit Chitale (founder CRYPTOcrats) started the evening by briefing the audience about the conceptualization of CRYPTOcrats and the journey so far. CRYPTOcrats is proud to have passed the milestone of having more than 200 members from all over the globe now. CRYPTmeet also received offline messages from some of the famous faces in the security field al over the world. Dr. Cetin Koc and few other cryptographers outside India expressed their enthusiasm about the activities and discussions that CRYPTocrats has been bringing forth and extended their best wishes for the future CRYPTOcrats endeavors.
The panel for the evening comprised of individuals from varied backgrounds like hardcore cryptographers, security engineers, CTOs, authors-columnists and professors in the security circle. The panelists spoke in two rounds in which they covered the scenarios for present and speculated niche security fields respectively. Dr. Virendra Sule (Head of Information Security Group at Computational Research Labs Pune) elaborated the ongoing work on PKI, one way hash functions in cryptography and also opined on his speculations for the impending trends in the coming decade. Prof. Ingle (Head of CSE Dept at PICT) enlightened the audience on Secure Group Communication protocols and the direction of ongoing developments. Aniruddha Shrotri (CTO, founder E-Lock) elaborated the Digital Signature and its pivotal role in the modern day electronic transactions. Atul Shah (Director at MOCANA), being from a network architecture background spoke on the link between security layer and the network layer and the various aspects that influence the choice of network layers specifications according top the expected level of security. Atul Kahate (Author of Cryptography and Network Security, and a columnist from Indian national dailies) presented the concept, need and implementation of Single Sign-on for running applications requiring multiple authentications. Mandar Marulkar (KPIT Cummins) took the audience through the journey of implementing a network security infrastructure for an organization having segregated computer network.
The evening was followed by an interesting question and answer session which touched upon an array of issues like simultaneous encryption and compression for multimedia broadcasts, multi-party secure group communication protocols and perfect secrecy of a system. Participants were given a CRYPTOcrats card with a cipher stream in the corner (which modeled the growth of CRYPTOcrats in numbers and dates). Surprise gifts were handed out to those who cracked the cipher stream.
All in all, the CRYPTOmeet brought together the flavors from multi-hued domains and gave a taste of the frontier works in security areas as well as of where the experts anticipate the areas to converge during the coming decades.
Team CRYPTOcrats.