About Professor Yvo Desmedt

Yvo Desmedt received his Ph.D. (Summa cum Laude) from the University of Leuven, Belgium (1984). At present he is the Chair of Information Communication Technology at University College London. He has held visiting appointments at AIST (Japan), Macquarie University (Australia), Technion (Israel), Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan), Universite de Montreal (Canada), University of Karlsruhe (Germany), etc. He is an (associate) editor of Information Processing Letters, The Journal of Computer Security, Computers & Security, and Advanced Mathematics of Communications. He is also the Editor-in-chief of IET Information Security. He was program chair of Crypto 1994, the ACM workshop on Scientific Aspects of Cyber Terrorism 2002, PKC 2003, ICITS 2007, and co-program chair of CANS 2005. He was an invited speaker at conferences and workshop in 5 continents. He has authored over 200 refereed papers. He is a Fellow of the International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR), since 2010. He has worked on cryptography, computer security, identification (entity authentication), information hiding, malware, network security, etc.

30 years computer hacking: can we achieve secure and trusted computing?

Although some primitive form of hacking predates 1981, the formation of the Chaos Computer Club on September 12, 1981 (Berlin) played a significant role in computer hacking as it now stands. Evidently, there were no computer viruses, no firewalls, no internet, etc. Similar groups were created in the USA around the same time (e.g., the Legion of Doom in 1984). The goal of this presentation is not to survey the history of computer insecurity, but to wonder whether we can achieve secure and trusted computing.

We briefly survey the state of the art in cryptography and computer security. Research in both areas is quite different. For example, cryptanalysis is regarded as very scientific, while hacking is often regarded as a borderline illegal activity.

The disciplines that may contribute to strengthen information security and trust will be overviewed briefly. Examples are discussed in more details.