As the cybersecurity field continues to grow in popularity and importance, the students in Capitol’s Doctor of Science in Information Assurance program are routinely publishing and presenting their findings for interested audiences.
In this past December’s issue of Computer Magazine, doctoral student Kim Schaffer published the article titled “Are Password Requirements too Difficult?” The article details the history of password use in the cyber world, questions password change cycles, and discusses the increasing use of authentication methods.
“In large systems, it usually isn’t difficult to guess or harvest usernames. The ability to aggregate them presents a vulnerability that’s difficult to mitigate: it’s easier and safer for an attacker to try a single password formulation criteria against a large number of usernames than to try a large number of passwords on a single username. Dispersing the source of the attacks over several systems can make it difficult to determine an appropriate response, especially over a widely dispersed user base.”
Full access to Schaffer’s piece is available at Computer Magazine.
Cybersecurity professionals congregated at the Washington Hilton for the annual hacker convention known as ShmooCon last month. Among those in attendance was Capitol doctoral student Char Sample, who presented at the convention.
Sample’s presentation was titled “Soft Markers in Attack Distribution” and discussed the role of soft markers as they pertain to problem solving and attempts to determine the relationship between these markers and network attacks. For cybersecurity professionals, the inability to correctly attribute attacks often makes the task of defending against them much more difficult.
Learn more about ShmooCon 2012, and view The Washington Post’s write up of the event.
Finally, doctoral student Daniel Ford recently made presentations at two separate conferences concerning the “Mobile Revolution.” Ford appeared at the DoubleTake Mobility Conference and the Secure Enterprise Mobility Conference and Expo. Ford’s discussion focused on the evolution of mobile computing, the future of the industry, the risks of mobile computing, and how risks can be addressed. Additionally, Ford was also recently named Chief Security Officer for Fixmo, a mobile risk management company.