Enigma, The Sequel

Posted by Parisa Tabriz, Security Princess & Enigma Program Co-Chair
Last year we helped launch USENIX Enigma, a conference focused on bringing together security and privacy experts from academia, industry, and public service. After a successful first run, we’re supporting Enigma again this year and looking forward to more great talks and an ever-engaging hallway track!

Our speakers this year include practitioners from many tech industry leaders, researchers and professors at universities from around the world, and civil servants working at agencies in the U.S. and abroad. In addition to sessions focused specifically on software security, spam and abuse, and usability, the program will cover interdisciplinary topics, like the intersection of security and artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and society.

I’m also very proud to have some of my Google colleagues speaking at Enigma:

• Sunny Consolvo will present results from a qualitative study of the privacy and security practices and challenges of survivors of intimate partner abuse. Sunny will also share how technology creators can better support the victims and survivors of such abuse.

• Damian Menscher has been battling botnets for a decade at Google and has witnessed the evolution of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) scaling and attack ingenuity. Damian will describe his operation of a DDoS honeypot, and share specific things he learned while protecting KrebsOnSecurity.com.

• Emily Schechter will be talking about driving HTTPS adoption on the web. She’ll go over some of the unexpected speed bumps major web sites have encountered, share how Chrome approaches feature changes that encourage HTTPS usage, and discuss what’s next to get to a default encrypted web.

As we did last year, my program co-chair, David Brumley, and I are developing a program full of short, thought-provoking presentations followed by lively discussion. Our program committee has worked closely with each speaker to help them craft the best version of their talk. Everyone is excited to share them, and there’s still time to register! I hope to see many of you in Oakland at USENIX Enigma later this month.

PS: Warning! Self-serving Google notice ahead… We’re hiring! We believe that most security researchers do what they do because they love what they do. What we offer is a place to do what you love—but in the open, on real-world problems, and without distraction. Please reach out to us if you’re interested.