EICAR 2008 Conference, Laval, France

It has been a while since I have posted anything on my blog. Life has been busy with work and family, but things have been good. I had the opportunity to present a paper at the EICAR 2008 conference, which was held in Laval, France. It was great to be able to know some of the well respected people from computer security academia and the industry. During this time, I was also able to do some traveling with my wife and see some amazing places and meet fascinating people. It has truly been a pleasurable experience.

The conference - merging academia and industry

The EICAR 2008 conference I attended was very interesting and informative. It provided for an atmosphere of personal interaction with the attendees. The good thing about the EICAR conference is that people who attend are from a diverse group of academic and and industry backgrounds. This allows technology and knowledge transfer between the two sectors, which in my opinion, is a key factor for the growth of both. While I represent the industry steam, some of the academic presentations helped me understand how theoretical ideas could or could not be applied for practical purposes. In turn, the people in academia get insight of whether their work is relevant (or useful) to real-world practical use. I must admit that some of the technologies being developed at Universities can very well find a place in the commercial market and be used for malware analysis and mitigation. One such technology is the VILO malware defense suite being developed at University of Louisiana at Lafayette (from where I had graduated in Dec 2004 with a Masters in Computer Science). This tool demonstrates how program-matching techniques can help in triage, in-depth malware analysis and signature generation.

Presentation

The paper I presented was about "User-mode memory scanning on 32-bit & 64-bit Windows". It details about the background and theory of implementing the memory scanner as well as its pros and cons of using it from user mode. You can find the paper and presentation here.

The fun part

We were treated to a nice gala dinner on the evening of first day in the old castle (Vieux Chateau). It was quite fun and I also had the privilege of bringing my wife to it as well. We definitely had a good time and the group at our table were a fun and lively bunch to interact with. The evening was well spent while listening to authentic French live band playing in the background.

Me and my beautiful wife, Amy Adams.

Click Here to see more pictures about our stay in Laval, France.

My wife likes to blog as well and she has a nice one about this trip to Europe. Click Here to visit her blog.