Kaspersky Academy Cyber Security for the Next Generation Student Conference

A common lament in the security industry is the lack of young talent, of educated and dedicated people coming out of universities with fresh ideas. Executives and engineers often wonder aloud where the next generation of security folks will come from. But looking at the innovative and clever research on display at the Kaspersky Academy Cyber Security for the Next Generation Student Conference going on in Brooklyn this week, there are plenty of good ideas on the horizon.

The goal of the conference, which is put on in conjunction with NYU-Poly and held on the school’s downtown Brooklyn campus, is to surface the best research being done by the brightest young minds in universities around the United States. Doctoral candidates and other research students from New York, California and numerous other states have come here looking to share their knowledge and enthusiasm for security and learn from their counterparts, a chance that they don’t often get.

For many of the students, the Kaspersky conference is their first opportunity to speak in front of an audience and to share their original ideas with a wider group of people. There’s plenty of nervous energy among the invited students, but all were looking forward to the chance to bring their research out into the open.

Now in its second year, the student conference has attracted some presentations that show great promise for addressing some of the thornier security problems facing consumers and businesses today. As cloud computing has become a major part of the landscape for both enterprises and home users, security concerns have come along with it. One of the conference participants, Pankaj Kumar Khatkar, is presenting a new idea for defending cloud platforms in a paper called, “DDN: Dynamic Defense Networks for Cloud Computing”.

Other students also will be addressing serious problems, such as defending Web applications against code injection and providing security for remote users. Often in technology, the ideas that end up becoming major products or successful services begin as small bits of research developed by one student or a group of researchers who are passionate about the topic at hand.

The promise and enthusiasm shown by the student participants at the Kaspersky conference at NYU-Poly makes one optimistic about what’s to come in security in the near future.