From Intrusion Detection to Supervisable Software Design
Time: 11.00 am
Location: Room Garda, Polo scientifico e tecnologico "Fabio Ferrari", Building Povo 1, via Sommarive 5, Povo (Trento)
Speaker
- Prof. Sandro Etalle - TU Eindhoven, UTwente, and SecurityMatters BV, The Netherlands
Abstract
I landed on the field of intrusion detection in 2004, after years of moving from rather theoretical to increasingly more practical research topics. We dove into the intrusion detection field with the declared intent of setting up a company afterwards. After years of trying many useless ideas, we focused on a couple of promising technologies. In 2009, my 2 PhD students Damiano Bolzoni and Emmanuele Zambon and myself started SecurityMatters. As of May 2017, SecurityMatters is doing well, and there are some very demanding customers who are very happy with its network monitoring system. So, in-between the failures, we must have done a couple of things right. In this talk, I would like to share with you some of the lessons learned. In particular, I believe the single most important reason why we are so helpless against cyber-attackers is that present systems are not supervisable. We should start writing software and systems that are supervisable by design and, in particular, we should definitely do so for embedded devices.
About the Speaker
Sandro Etalle was 19 when he founded his first high-tech company. He has been co-founder of TecLogic and of ICON, two specialized software companies. He served several years in the management team of TecLogic, and one term as Vice-President. Meanwhile, he finished his studies at the conservatory and in mathematics (cum laude). In 1992, he left the business world to pursue an academic career. In 1995, he received a PhD from the University of Amsterdam. After working at the University of Genova (Italy), Amsterdam, and Maastricht, in 2001 he moved as Assistant Professor the University of Twente (UT). Etalle lead the UT-wide Strategic Research Orientation and Spearhead Program on Computer Security. While at the UT, he was one of the initiators, founder and manager of the Kerckhoffs Institute, a cooperative effort between the UT, the Radboud University of Nijmegen and the Technical University of Eindhoven (TU/e) which provides an MSc in computer security. After a year as visiting professor at the University of Trento, in 2007 Etalle became full professor and head of the computer security group at the TU/e. In 2009, Prof. Etalle founded SecurityMatters, together with his former PhD students Damiano Bolzoni and Emmanuele Zambon. Etalle has been CEO of SecurityMatters for more than 4 years and with SecurityMatters he won in 2012 the COMMIT Science Valorization prize. Prof. Etalle is one of the authors of the Dutch “National Cyber Security Research Agenda”, he has been the scientific director of EIPSI, the Eindhoven Institute for the Protection of Systems and Information, and the leader of several National and EU projects for a total budget in the tens of millions of Euro, and has been program chair of several international conferences.
Sandro has been appointed Visiting professor at University of Trento for the years 2017-2020. This week he will be visiting Trento. Step into Fabio Massacci's office in Povo 1 to meet him after the talk.
Contact person regarding this talk: fabio.massacci [at] unitn.it (Fabio Massacci)