ACCU and Bletchley Park Security Conference 2010 « Security Ninja
Hi everyone,
I don’t normally write blog posts to advertise security conferences but I have been made aware of an upcoming conference that I feel I need to make you aware of.
Almost all of the security conferences I’ve attended or spoken at have been held in venues with no real connection to our industry. A hotel conference room has no information security history to it but Bletchley Park does. If you don’t know the information security history of Bletchley Park then you should really read up on it, especially its wartime history!
Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park was home to many people who would be called hackers (the MIT definition of a hacker not the modern media definition) if they worked in our industry now. A lot of well known people worked at Bletchley Park including Alan Turing who designed the Bombe cryptanalytic machine:
Bombe
The bombe was used to figure out the rotor settings required for the Enigma machines to decrypt any transmissions captured from enemy forces.
Enigma
In addition to the Bombe and Enigma machines Bletchley Park was the birthplace of one of (if not the first) electronic computers called Colossus. Colossus was used to decrypt teleprinter messages encrypted with the German Lorenz cipher.
Colossus
Each year the ACCU organises a one day conference on security to raise money for the Bletchley Park Trust, the body which runs Bletchley Park, the World War II UK cryptography centre where the legendary German ‘Enigma’ code was cracked, and for The National Museum of Computing, also housed at Bletchley Park. This year the conference will be held on the 6th November.
The conference has four excellent speakers including Bruce Schneier and Whitfield Diffie. In addition to the speakers the conference attendees will also be treated to a guided tour of Bletchley Park. The conference costs £85 for ACCU members and £100 for non members with all the proceeds going to the Bletchley Park trust and the National Museum of Computing to help with the upkeep of the Bletchley Park site.
You can register for the conference here.
Even if you can’t make it to the conference you should have Bletchley Park on your places to visit list if you are in England. They host a lot of events as well as having a lot very cool things to see and be part of.
I have to thank Kelsey Griffin for sending me the pictures you can see in this blog post. If you use Twitter make sure you follow Bletchley Park for the latest Bletchley Park news!
I hope to see you there!
SN
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 30th, 2010 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Ninja News and Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.