Keynote Speeches

Keynote Speech I
Title: Application Security - Myth or Reality?
Speaker: Bill Caelli
Abstract: The implementation and verification of information security services and mechanisms within application systems has received recent widespread attention. Moreover, it has been suggested that it may be the only way to increase overall information system assurance in an era where ICT governance and resulting compliance requirements have taken on new force internationally and the use of commodity level and “off-the-shelf” ICT products for critical information systems continues. While it has been argued that an application can be no more secure than the middleware / libraries it uses, the operating system upon which this all stands and even computer / data network hardware and firmware, security at the application layer was always envisaged as playing a vital role. Indeed security at the “application layer” was seen as a major technique in the 1980’s “Open Systems Interconnection (OSI)” security model (International Standard IS 7498 – 2). At a time when
  • “end-user” programming is being advocated and could become a reality in the near future,
  • the role and function of computer/information technology education and training is rapidly changing, and
  • the challenge of increased threats from Internet connection is rapidly rising, coupled with the introduction of “web services” style applications,
there is a need to reconsider security schemes at the application level. This paper examines current trends in application design, development, deployment and management and evaluates these against known system vulnerabilities and threats.
Keynote Speech II
Title: Towards Efficient & Novel Security Solutions - A Marriage of Crypto and Trusted Computing Platform
Speaker: Robet H. Deng
Abstract: Cryptographic algorithms and protocols can do many wonderful things. Most crypto protocols, however, make very weak assumptions about the computing platforms. As a result, they are often too complicated or intruduce too high an overhead to be useful in real applications.

Trusted computing has a long history. The most recent attempt is by the Trusted Computing Group which defines a set of trusted computing platform (TCP) specifications aiming to provide hardware-based root of trust and a set of mechanisms to propagate trust to applications as well as across platforms.

In this talk, we advocate a new approach to security designs. Instead of approaching the problems from pure cryptographic point of review, we examine problems and assumptions from a combined view of cryptography and trusted computing with an aim of designing more efficient or novel security solutions. We illustrate the idea with several specific examples.
Keynote Speech III
Title: Tools and Technology for Computer Forensics: Research and Development in Hong Kong
Speaker: Lucas Hui
Abstract: With the increased use of Internet and information technology all over the world, there is an increased amount of criminal activities that involve computing and digital data. These digital crimes (e-crimes) impose new challenges on prevention, detection, investigation, and prosecution of the corresponding offences. Computer forensics (also known as cyberforensics) is an emerging research area that applies computer investigation and analysis techniques to help detection of these crimes and gathering of digital evidence suitable for presentation in courts. This new area combines the knowledge of information technology, forensics science, and law and gives rise to a number of interesting and challenging problems related to computer security and cryptography that are yet to be solved. In this paper, we present and discuss some of these problems together with two successful cases of computer forensics technology developed in Hong Kong that enable the law enforcement departments to detect and investigate digital crimes more efficiently and effectively. We believe that computer forensics research is an important area in applying security and computer knowledge to build a better society.
Keynote Speech IV
Title: E-voting by Zero-Knowledge
Speaker: Victor K. Wei