Scuttlebutt – Summer in the city, reviews, and more security content
Dear readers,
gossip has been a bit rare in the past weeks. This was because of the intense summer heat here in Vienna. The opposite of the chill factor made working in the hot city extremely difficult. Additionally, we tackled dealing with backend archaeology. A part of our internal application for managing the call for papers, the reviews, and the schedule celebrates its 10th birthday. I like code that runs smoothly despite platform updates, but now is the time for some changes. And no, we do not expose the code to the Internet. You can stop looking for it. 😉
We just finished the major part of reviews of the submissions. It always takes a while, given that we start with the final review in August. Contacting people during Summer adds extra round trip time when looking for answers during the reviews. The ROOTS submissions take a while longer. The reason is the full academic peer review process. The assessment of scientific content has more constraints and requires a thorough analysis of the submitted documents. Expect the ROOTS schedule in September.
COVID-19 is still present. We intend to conduct DeepSec and DeepINTEL as a presence event in combination with virtual presentations and live streams for remote participants. We did everything fully virtual in 2020, so the configuration will be similar. Given the increased vaccination rate and adapted regulations for vaccinated persons, there is a real chance of meeting each other in the conference hotel. The hotel staff is looking forward to experiencing the DeepSec conference again.
Keeping pace with current events is hard in information security. We tried analysing and commenting on some of the past events in our blog, but frankly we could not keep up. There is some research of ours in the pipeline, but it does not match the headlines. Keeping one’s sanity requires not reading news these days. Furthermore, our intent is not to produce clickbait and push it to connected devices. DeepSec always was about in-depth content, so we are ignoring the temptation of social media metrics. Apart from our blog, there is content online we worked on. First, there are our press releases. Then there are a couple of podcasts created by @KZotzmann (podcasts are in German, though), and later in October there will be a presentation by me at the Privacy Week 2021 and the IT Security Exchange at St. Pölten UAS. The topics will be the security of multi-purpose printers and the Dev/Sec/Ops failure in teams creating software. Both fields feature ample opportunities for breaking security models.
So if you are still on holiday, then enjoy the quiet time without interrupts. If something connected you to your office again, please have a look at DeepSec’s schedule and spread the word.
Take care,
René.
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