Last Thursday I visited an event of the “Competence Center for Applied Security Technology for IT security” (CAST) in Darmstadt, where CAST awarded the best IT security final paper of bachelor, diploma and other qualified students in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. With Astaro sponsoring part of the CAST IT security competition, I was one of the jurors who got to read five entries. After what I’ve seen, I have to say: there really have been some outstanding IT security thesis papers this year! The ten best award entries presented their ideas at the event on Thursday. The quality of the speeches was amazing and exceeded all my expectations. Especially winner Lucas Vincento Davi from the Ruhr University in Bochum with the topic “Return Oriented Programming Attacks” as well as Felix Gröber with the topic “Automatic Identification of Cryptographic Primitives in Software” captured my full attention.
After spending eight hours of listening to the various projects, I am absolutely thrilled with the results and the ideas the students came up with. I honestly don’t know how they managed to squeeze everything into one final paper. But it showed me once again that it is definitely worth for us to support this CAST competition project because in the end we will be awarded with exceptionally interesting results by very talented IT people.
Next year we will need to put a strong focus on getting more students to participate in this award competition. We have so many young hidden IT security talents at our universities; it would be a shame if we could not get their researches and ideas to be as appreciated as they ought to be. For Astaro as an IT security provider it is our duty to support and help the CAST organisation actively with this – now and in future.
IT security will become more and more important. Hence, the potential of this event offers huge possibilities for upcoming technology developments and security approaches. So am I happy with the event on Thursday? Yes, I most certainly am!
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The original article/video can be found at IT security theses on a high-quality level during the CAST event