Summer is running out, but to keep our feelings high we could not miss this great summer school about Security and Privacy on Smart and Mobile devices. The SMDSP summer school just started on Monday, September 1st, in the beautiful city of Padua. It is organized by some of actual main experts in the field, like professor Mauro Conti, from the University of Padua, the director of the school, professor Asokan from Aalto University and professor Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi from TU Darmstadt.
In fact, the school is co-orgnaized by the University of Padua, particularly the Department of Mathematics, the Aalto University, the Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt, and the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Secure Computing.
The University of Padua is a long tradition University (among the earliest Universities of the world, founded in 1222 as the second one in Italy, just after Bologna; it also hosted people like Galileo Galilei and Nicolaus Copernicus).
The main focus of this summer school is to bring together members from the international security research community to debate contemporary issues in the area of smartphone security and privacy, which is becoming more and more important in the era of Internet of Things.
25 students and 15 organizers, between scientific and operational committees are going to work together for one week, to discuss their works and ideas about this interesting fields.
On Monday works have been opened by the Chancellor’s delegate, Ms. Lucia Regolin and by the Director of the Department of Mathematics, Mr. Bruno Viscolani, explaining us how this school reflects the motto of Padua University “Universa Universis Patavina Libertas“, which aims to give always more freedom of thoughts to teachers and students, along all its long history.
Later, prof. Asokan has introduced us in the world of Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), where Trusted means that the environment is isolated from the “normal” execution environment (where OS and “normal” applications run), so that integrity is protected. He showed us what constitutes a TEE environment and some used architectures, and which are the state of the art being developed nowadays. He showed us the ongoing work on TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 2.0 and its differences with the past one, 1.2.
Professor Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi gave us a very interesting lecture about the security of mobile platforms in general, going deeper on Android security framework and showing us which are the most problematic attacks one has generally to fight and how doing security is hard work and very difficult to do thoroughly even it things appear to be correct.
As prof. Sadeghi put it: “never trust a working thing“.
To conclude the day, professor Mauro Conti showed us their ongoing works in this matter and the latest issues they are concerned about. And then he also promised to show us why exactly his department’s acronym is SPRITZ…
Silvia Malatini & Lorenz Cuno Klopfenstein