Keynote 1

Challenges in Critical Infrastructure Security

Corrado Leita, Symantec Research Labs Europe

The threat landscape is continuously evolving. Large, widespread worm infections are leaving more and more space to more stealthy attacks targeting highly valuable targets. Industrial control systems (ICS) are rapidly becoming a new major target of cyber-criminals: industrial control systems are evolving, bringing powerful capabilities into the critical infrastructure environment along with new and yet undiscovered threats. This was pointed out in multiple occasions by security experts and was confirmed by a recent survey carried out by Symantec: according to the survey (http://bit.ly/bka8UF), 53% of a total of 1580 critical infrastructure industries have admitted to being targeted by cyber attacks. The survey implies that the incidents reported by the press over the last several years are nothing but the tip of a considerably larger problem: the vast majority of the incidents has never been disclosed. Moreover, when looking at the few publicly disclosed incidents such as Stuxnet, we see a completely different level of sophistication when compared to traditional malware witnessed in the wild in previous years. This talk will dive into the challenges and the opportunities associated to ICS security research, and on the tools at our disposal to improve our ability to protect such critical environments.

Dr. Corrado Leita is a Researcher in Symantec Research Labs Europe. He obtained his Bachelor degree in 2003 and a Master's in Computer Science and Engineering in 2006, both from the Politecnico di Torino (Turin, Italy). During this period, he performed part of his studies at EURECOM (Sophia Antipolis, France). In 2005 he obtained a Master's in Networks and Distributed Systems from the ESSI (Sophia Antipolis, France). His ESSI master thesis was the result of six months of work in the Pervasive Computing Group of IBM Zurich Research Labs. He performed his Ph.D. research work at EURECOM and obtained his Ph.D. in 2008 from the University of Nice. Dr. Leita's interests lie in the generation of intelligence on the Internet Threat Landscape by means of collection and analysis of empirical data. He is actively involved in the development and maintenance of SGNET, a distributed honeypot deployment that leverages protocol learning techniques to collect information on unknown attacks, and of HARMUR, a dataset aiming at building a historical perspective over web threats. Dr. Leita is on the Program Committee in various international conferences, such as DSN DCCS, the Usenix workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET), and the Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID).

Keynote 2

How to build IT spin-off company

Jiri Tobola, INVEA-TECH

The presentation describes experiences of academic R&D group from its foundation, EU projects participation, growth from 5 to 50 people and EU project reviewers recommendation to commercialization of the technology, up to the establishment of IT spin-off and 5 years on the market experience (pros/contras/goals/achievements). Covered technologies include application acceleration in FPGA, NetFlow monitoring and network behavior analysis.

Jiri works as sales director at company INVEA-TECH, Brno, Czech Republic. Since 2003 he was researcher, developer and later project leader at Czech national research and education network – CESNET. He worked on design of solutions for monitoring large scale networks based on FPGA acceleration using wide spread industrial standard for computer network monitoring based on IP flows. He was leader of Liberouter, NIFIC and NIC projects – development of network devices based on FPGA platform. His responsibilities were management of the group, firmware developing and assembling (VHDL), simulations, software developing, testing and documentation. Design and implementation of processor, memory controllers, pattern matching units and other components for Xilinx FPGAs. After successful participation on several European projects (e.g. SCAMPI, 6NET, GÉANT2) he became one of the founders and leaders at the INVEA-TECH company which is focused on innovative and effective solutions for network monitoring and security for networks from 10 Mbps to 100 Gbps. Jiri is working with various types of clients with various types of networks to help them to analyze the network traffic and design network security monitoring solutions tailored to their specific needs. He has a deep technical background in network monitoring & security, NetFlow/IPFIX, FPGA technology. He is interested in new trends in IP based networks, how to monitor and secure them against new threats using network security monitoring and anomaly detection techniques