CMSA Computer Science for Mathematicians: Cybersecurity research in the wild

Cybersecurity research exhibits classic yet complex challenges, melding together cryptography, programming language design, and computational complexity, along with psychology and industrial design.

One example of these challenges is crafting an expressive yet safe programming language. SQL — the most popular database querying language — is, however, far from being safe; its expressiveness and lack of care in design result in countless SQL injection attacks to this day. The approaches to mitigating this design flaw vary between academia and industry and involve a mixture of graph analysis, system engineering and new designs of programming interfaces.

During this talk I will review the different participants in frontier research: industry, academia, nationstates and hobbyists. The first part of the talk will focus on these participants and their incentives, while the second part will contrast how academia is approaching them compared to industry and nationstates.