I’ve been pretty busy for the past few months in my day job, but I’ve got a bit of free time at the moment to start blogging again. I just sent an update to ETSI on the barcamp in France in January, so I thought I’d share it here too. It was a great day and I’ll try and share a couple of the blogs and topics of discussion in a few days but here’s the report so far!
Discussions continue after the barcamp at the WAC sponsored drinks event
Report to ETSI:
The day before the ETSI security workshop, the 2nd annual Mobile Camp Sophia Antipolis took place. Following the traditional format of a barcamp – that of an ‘unconference’, the agenda for the day is decided on the day by the attendees. This fluidity allows for very recent items of interest to be discussed and converging views. The concentration of topics was on mobile security and the camp benefited from the large number of attendees who would be going on to the ETSI workshop. Topics ranged from privacy, mobile application security, incident handling to mobile health. Some highlights of the privacy discussion were the contradiction between data retention and data privacy, the ability to make monetary transactions anonymously and the naivety of users. On the subject of applications, the ethics of kill switches, the question of whether 2011 will be the year of mobile malware or not and the level of vetting by app stores were robustly debated. No conclusion was reached during the discussion of “which device is the most secure” but the security of embedded systems and the hacking community around that area still continues to be an interesting topic. The increasing importance of connected devices and critical national infrastructure was highlighted during a discussion on Intelligent Transport Systems. A number of early incidents for machine-to-machine solutions give a pointer to security issues to come. All in all, the attendees had an enjoyable day, followed by a sponsored buffet and drinks. Attendees came from across the world, from as far as South Korea, the USA and Russia. Views from the outside were coming in to the camp through twitter and the subsequent blogs after the event also added substantially to the debate. We look forward to the 3rd Mobile Camp next year.