Young School Finalists Defined

The Young School competition is being held for the third time in a row. The goal of the contest is to support young and talented specialists in information security giving them the opportunity to present their reports at the Positive Hack Days forum. A range of topics is rather wide, from applied cryptography through to ICS and government information systems security. The competition is designed for students, postgraduates, and young scientists.

Applications for participation in the contest were accepted during three months. The most outstanding reports were selected this week. Here's the list of the finalists (in the order of abstracts receiving):

• Maria Korosteleva and her report “Ensuring Cryptographically Strong Group Communications with the Feature of Deniability”
• Philipp Bourtyka and Alyna Trepacheva with a report “Secure Cloud Computations Using Steganography: Definitions and Challenges”,
• Nikolay Tkachenko presenting “General Model of Web Applications Protection Techniques Based on Hash Functions”,
• Yelena Doynikova reporting on “Dynamic Assessment of Computer Networks Security in SIEM Systems”.

One of them will be the winner. The list of out-of-competition participants will include Alexander Puzankov presenting his report with an intriguing name “Tough Time” and Maxim Kobilev, who will tell how to use a quadrocopter as a pentest tool.

Young researchers will present their reports at Positive Hack Days IV. Congratulations!

The program committee

This year, the program committee included:

• Denis Gamayunov, MSU Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics
• Alexey Kachalin, Advanced Monitoring
• Vladimir Ivanov, Yandex
• Evgeny Rodionov, MEPhI
• Peter Volkov, Yandex
• Dmitry Oleksyuk, an independent developer
• Alexey Smirnov, Parallels
• Igor Kotenko, SPIIRAS
• Nikita Abdullin, OpenWay
• Alexandra Dmitrienko, Technical University of Darmstadt
• Pavel Laskov, University of Tübingen
• Ekaterina Rudina, Kaspersky Lab
• Evgeny Tumoyan, the South Russian Regional Scientific Center of SFedU

Andrey Petukhov, the chairman of the program committee, told us about the Young School final: “Sporting competitions may be played with a final four, which gives prestige to its participants. Such type of final builds up and increases the suspense during a contest. Young School holds its intrigue as well. First of all, Denis Kolegov and Nikolay Tkachenko, who took third place in the last year's competition, now are among the finalists. The list of finalists also includes representatives of the Laboratory of Computer Security Problems of SPIIRAS. And we know that last year, second place was awarded to a report received from the laboratory. Another finalist, Maria Korosteleva, a student of the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics of MSU, will try to match the success of the very first Young School competition winner, Anastasiya Scherbinina from the same faculty. Besides, it would be interesting to see how the newcomers, Philipp and Alyna from SFedU, will compete with the rest, more experienced participants.”

Positive Hack Days IV will be held on May 21 and 22 in Moscow. You can register and visit the forum to see how the future of Russian science is created.