Like in the past two years, we attended the SWITS seminar with a COINS delegation this year. SWITS is the Swedish IT Security Network for Ph.D. Students, in many ways a network of Ph.D. students and faculty like COINS. Samson Gejibo, Bikash Agrawal, Vivek Agrawal, and Seraj Fayyad joined from COINS.
SWITS organised its annual seminar for the 15th time. It is held in a different place in Sweden each year, and this year it took place close to Västerås. 65 people from 18 institutions attended.
The first day started with an introduction of all IT security research groups in Sweden. Every group got some minutes to present its people, research focus etc. COINS was also given the possibility to present. Most of the remaining time was spent in sessions where PhD. students presented their research and status of their Ph.D. Presentations usually lasted 15 minutes each, including feedback and discussion. Presentations were grouped by topics, e.g. there were sessions on privacy, network security, information flow control etc.
In the afternoon of the first day, the audience split up into different working groups. One working group discussed cooperation between SWITS and COINS. We concluded with several ideas that we want to implement this year:
- Invite SWITS students to the COINS summer school on cloud security in Metochi in August. Daniel Hedin from SWITS is one of the lecturers.
- Invite SWITS students to the COINS Ph.D. student seminar in Stockholm 18-19 October 2015, sponsor travel+accommodation.
- For the week after the Ph.D. student seminar, and in parallel with NordSec, we envision to form a SWITS/COINS team with Ph.D. and master students to participate in the hack.lu CTF competition. An idea to have a team of professors in addition was dropped.
- A bold idea is to have a SWITS seminar in Norway instead of Sweden some time in the future, maybe as early as 2017.
After the formal programme, all participants were invited to the Sala Silver Mine with a long history.
The second day continued with student presentations and an invited talk by a representative of MSB (Swedish Civil Contingencis Agency), the sponsor providing financial support to the SWITS seminar.
