ITA Software's Technical Seminar Series

Talk Topic: The Dark Future of Desktop Security, And How to Stop It
Ivan Krstic, Harvard, OLPC
April 9, 2008

Abstract

It's 2008. About 75% of all corporate machines are infected with at least one piece of malicious code. We're seeing the emergence of weapons-grade botnets, designer trojans, smart mobile malware, and the graduation for the black hat community from what was once a ragtag army of rebels without cause to a group of well-paid professionals engaging in research-quality work to rake in profits and evade detection.

The entrenched players in the security industry have been predictably slow to respond. Now, seemingly bewildered by the new security landscape, they are increasingly finding salvation in restrictive new systems that threaten to transform your computer into little more than a glorified abacus.

There must be a better way.

This session will turn to history and explain how we dug ourselves into the present predicament, and then look at Bitfrost, the One Laptop per Child security system, for lessons on how we might dig ourselves out. 

Bio

Ivan Krsti is a software architect and a researcher currently on leave from Harvard University. Until recently, he worked as a director of security architecture at One Laptop per Child, and education non-profit that aimed to produce a $100 laptop for children in the developing world.

Prior to that, Ivan served as a director of research at the medcal informatics laboratory of a European children's hospital, tackling the infrastructure and security problems in wide-scale digital healthcare.

Ivan is deeply involved in open-source and free software, co-authored the best-selling Official Ubantu Linux Book, and specializes in architecture and security of large distributed systems. He has consulted on both matters for some of the largest websites on the Internet.

Described by Wired magazine as a "security guru", in 2007 MIT Technology Review named him one of the world's top innovators under the age of 35 for his work on the OLPC security platform, Bitfrost. Recently, eWEEK magazine declared him one of the top three most influential people in modern computer security.