Cipher

Computer Security is without doubt one of the most important areas inside Information Technology. During IT creation the main idea was to do our wok fast , during Internet’s creation the main objective was to have access to informaion. But while the monster’s (INternet) growth was so fast no one was aware (or good Evangelist) on how important will be to be safe inside this chaos. This situation is now visible to everyone since we do not trust no one and in more general , nothing inside the WEB. Many Academic and Commercial groups are now trying to create standards or to implement techniques which will protect everyone. But how you can protect users when you cannot control people’s Thinking , or acts.

Inside this race of inventions and research papers many people are trying to get involved, so they know how to protect their selves or how to protect other unware people who do not need (or want) to know all the low level informtaions during e.g. their visit inside a web shop.

Thats why at this time space is good idea to do a postgraduade or Undergraduate degree in this field. (Also my personal belief regarding IT Security is that : Is better to learn how to protect your self instead of letting other people do it for you. Since the biggest risk is to find people to trust instead of finding tools to trust)

IT Security can be splitted into two areas : Safe Communication and Sale Inormation. Before entering The IT Security world you need to choose a team. After doing that you have to choose your position inside these two philoshophical directoions , Security Expert or Illegal Security Expert . A real life representation is be a police man or be a criminal ? Although both of these directions are challenging you need to have different characteristics to join any of them.

Security Expert : Positive => Access to very expensive equipment Negative => You don’t know your enemy’s techniques or tools but he do

Illegal Security Expert : Positive => Freedom to act / You know your victims tools Negative => You have to do another job to feed your self and you do not have access to top level technology.

After thinking the above questions and you are sure that you fit in any of them you can use the following Academic list of security groups in order to choose which one of them better fits your needs.

• Australia
  • Laboratory for Information and Network Security (Monash.Edu)
  • Centre for Computer Security Research (University of Wollongong)
  • Distributed Systems Technology Centre (QUT)
  • Centre for Advanced Computing - Algorithms and Cryptography (Macquarie)
• Austria
  • Graz University of Technology ( Institute for Applied Information Processing and Communications)
  • Kryptographie in �sterreich (Linz)
• Belgium
  • COSIC ( COmputer Security and Industrial Cryptography)
  • UCL/DICE Crypto Group
  • SCSI, Brussels Free University
• Brazil
  • Equipe de Seguran�a em Sistemas e Redes (Universidade Estadual de Campinas)
• Canada
  • University of Montreal
  • Centre For Applied Cryptographic Research (University of Waterloo)
    • Menezes :Stinson :Vanstone :Williams
  • Queen’s Cryptography and Data Security Laboratory (Queen’s University)
  • Crypto & Quantum Info Lab (McGill)
• China
  • Institute of Information Security & Privacy (Xidian University)
• Croatia
  • Cryptographic Research Center, FER, Zagreb, Croatia
• Denmark
  • Cryptology Group (BRICS, Aarhus)
    :Ivan Damg�rd
    • Ronald Cramer
• Finland
  • Laboratory of Mathematics for Information Technology (Univ of Turku)
    :Ari Renvall
  • Helsinki University of Technology
    • Helger Lipmaa :/~mjos (Markku-Juhani Saarinen)
• France
  • GRECC (Group de Recherche en Complexite et Cryptographie) (Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris)
    • Oliver Baudron :Emmanuel Bresson :Louis Granboulan :Phong Nguyen :David Pointcheval :Jacques Stern
  • CSySEC (Uni. of Pau)
  • Toulon Crypto Base
• Germany
  • Applications of Informatics in Arts and Science (Hamburg)
  • Cryptography and Security (Universit�t des Saarlandes)
  • System Security (University of Karlsruhe)
  • Mathematische Informatik (Frankfurt)
  • Bochum
    • Communication Security (COSY) (Bochum)
      :Christof Paar
    • Institute for IT-Security and Cryptology (Bochum)
  • Darmstadt
    • Cryptography and Computer Algebra (Darmstadt)
    • Number Field Cryptography (Darmstadt)
• Greece
  • ICCS Security Group
  • Joint Research Group on Communication and Information Systems Security (Uni of Aegean)
• Israel
  • Weizmann
    • Alex Biryukov :Uriel Feige :Oded Goldreich :Shafi Goldwasser :Moni Naor :Adi Shamir
• Italy
  • University of Torino
• Japan
  • System Control and Management Okamoto Lab.
  • Matsumoto Laboratory
• Korea
  • Cryptology & Information Security Laboratory (ICU.AC.KR)
  • Information & Communications Security Laboratory
  • Com2MaC (Pohang University)
  • See also
    • Korean Crypto Groups (@KRyptoGate)
• Netherlands
  • Discrete Mathematics (Eindhoven)
    • Coding and Cryptography Group (Eindhoven)
      • Andries Brouwer :Arjen Lenstra :Ruud Pellikan :Berry Schoenmakers
• Norway
  • Coding Theory and Cryptography (Bergen)
• Russia
  • SCZI (Sankt-Petersburg)
    • Research directions (In Russian)
  • Math department of Sankth-Petersburg university
    • Seminar on Cryptography (In Russian)
• Spain
  • CRISES (Rovira i Virgili)
  • Seguretat, codificaci� i transport de la informaci� (Universitats Aut�noma de Barcelona)
  • Cryptography Research group (Universitat Polit�cnica de Catalunya)
• Sweden
  • University of Lund
    • Thomas Johansson
• Switzerland
  • Information Security and Cryptography (ETH Z�rich)
  • Communication Systems (EPFL)
  • LASEC (EPFL)
• UK
  • Cambridge University
  • The LSE Computer Security Research Centre (London School of Economics and Political Science)
  • Information Security Group (Royal Holloway University of London)
  • Cryptography and Information Security Group (Bristol)

  US

  • MIT
  • Harvard

The list is been taken by Helger Lipmaa’s webpage and there is another extremely big list of all Security related information located at University of Valencia (Spain)