Overview

What is security?: A computer is considered secure if you can depend on it to behave as you expect.; Yes, this is intentionally vague. This definition depends a lot on your expectations. If you exepct your data to remain unread and unmodified by others and no one is able to do so, then your machine is considered secure.

What we are going to cover in this workshop: We are going to try to teach you how to protect your data. For most, this simply involves keeping others from breaking into their dorm machine and reading their private email. We will talk about how to evaluate how much your data is worth to you as well as the attacker. We will cover some of the more popular methods of attack and how you can protect yourself.; Most importantly we will try to teach you how to think about security. There is no cookbook recipe to keeping your data secure. The real experts understand how the underlying concepts of security work and can adapt those ideas to whichever situation is at hand.

What we are not going to cover in this workshop: We are not here to teach you how to break into systems. We're not going to cover exploit scripts or intrusion methods. If this is the kind of thing you're interested in there are lots of resources available on the net to get you started.

Something to think about: There is really very little difference between a security expert who specializes in intrusion prevention/detection and one who specializes in breaking into systems. It all stems from the same knowledge base and how one uses that knowledge.; An expert on one side will generally also be an expert on the other.