Cryptography and Security in Focus

We just had two of the world's greatest cryptographers give talks this week. On Tuesday recent Turing award winner Shafi Goldwasser gave the first SCS Distinguished Lecture on "The Cryptographic Lens" showing how some early ideas in theoretical cryptography had incredible and unpredictable applications.

Today Martin Hellman, of Diffie-Hellman fame, gave the keynote speech at the Georgia Tech Cyber Security Summit drawing parallels between cyber security and protection from nuclear weapons.

Preceding Hellman's talk, Georgia Tech president Bud Peterson gave some opening remarks on the great importance of cyber security at Georgia Tech and GTISC in particular. Following Hellman's talk was a panel discussing current threats in cyber security. The panel included School of Computer Science assistant professor Chris Peikert.

The highlight of these annual summits is the release of the Georgia Tech Emerging Cyber Threats Report, Georgia Tech's view of the current state of affairs in cyber security. This year's report looks at data in the cloud, the Internet of things, mobile devices, cost of defense and information manipulation.