Seminar On practical Security
Welcome to the THIRTEENTH annual BU RISCS Seminar On practical Security.
The seminar meets:
- On summer Thursdays (May 29 - August 21, 2025)
- From 11:30-12:30pm Eastern Daylight Time
- Physically in PHO 339 or remotely for Israeli participants.
- Light lunch provided to physical attendees.
To get on our mailing list:
- Email: Prof. Ari Trachtenberg
(If you cannot figure out Prof. Trachtenberg's email address, perhaps you should consider a different seminar?)
Table of Contents
Introduction
The intent of the seminar is to focus on practical elements of security, including implementation, (technically) offensive and defensive approaches, and even physical security: the type of security that is typically represented in less academic hacker conferences such as
BLACKHAT,
DEFCON, BSIDES,
SHMOOCON, or the
Chaos Computing Congress. Such practical areas of security have still weakly permeated the academic community, and yet the academic world can provide a lot of needed guidance and fundamental thinking, in addition to getting some grounding in real-world challenges.
All elements of
practical security are in scope for this seminar. For example,
zero-click radio proximity attacks on iOS are appropriate, whereas a novel multi-party computation solution predicated on the ability of pigs to fly might not be (unless, of course, you provide a demonstration of said pigs, in which case it is
very appropriate.).
Seminar list
A presentation icon (
) denotes an accompanying slideshow provided by the speaker.
Open to
- Students … of any educational establishment (whether accredited or not!)
- Faculty … of any educational establishment
- Researchers, engineers, members of industry interested in practical security
Older seminars
You can find older seminars linked here:
- Summer 2023 - Seminar list, with some presentation slides, from 2024.
-
Summer 2022 - Wiped out by COVID
- Summer 2021 - Seminar list, with some presentation slides, from 2021.
- Summer 2020 - Seminar list, with some presentation slides, from 2020.
- Summer 2019 - Seminar list, with some presentation slides, from 2019.
- Summer 2018 - Seminar list, with some presentation slides, from 2018.
- Summer 2017 - Seminar list, with some presentation slides, from 2017.
- Summer 2016 - Seminar list, with some presentation slides, from 2016.
- Summer 2015 - Seminar list, with some presentation slides, from 2015.
- Summer 2014 - Seminar list, with some presentations slides, from 2014.
References
Students looking for presentation topics can consult the following references.
Faculty
Feel free to reach out to the seminar faculty if you're looking for paper recommendations:
- Manuel Egele - software security, computer architecture security
- Itamar Levi - architectural, logical, electrical and physical foundations of secure-hardware
- David Starobinski - software-defined radio, networking, IoT
- Ari Trachtenberg - side-channels, system security, spazontology
- Gianluca Stringhini - malicious online activity, system security, web security
- Eran Tromer - information security, cryptography and algorithms
- Mayank Varia - applied cryptography
- YOUR NAME HERE - If you're a faculty member associated with the seminar and would like your name to appear on this list, please e-mail Ari Trachtenberg. This is an OPT IN only process.
Hacker Conferences