This year the Hacknowledge Luxembourg team has participated to GEN – Grand Est Numérique – based in Metz, France. This event is one of the main one in the East of France and Luxembourg.
Some numbers about this event:
- Sixth edition
- More than 3000 visitors over two days
- 4300m2
- 80 Exhibitors
- 50 Speakers
This year GEN was organized at Robert Schuman congress center in center of Metz on 13thand 14thSeptember 2018.
Gen is a business event addressed to:
- Managers, Business leaders, Institutions of the territory
- Professionals, experts and digital actors
- Students
The program was very attractive (the list of all conferences is available here), but we could only participate to a few conferences due to lack of time.
The first one was a Blockchain workshop, concept explanation and DASH presentation. Sébastien Claudel explained, basically, what is blockchain concept, mathematics problem resolution to forge crypto money and complexity to solve these operations. Currently, it is no longer possible to forge money with “standard” computers. Complexity of problems resolution needs more and more power and energy. Due to cost of energy and our current CPUs and GPUs performances, it is not profitable to try mining crypto money.
DASH is a crypto money like Bitcoin or Ethereum but with specific features. DASH is a decentralized autonomous organization run by subset of users called Masternodes. This money uses different methods like InstantSend to confirm funds transaction, no need to wait 10mins or more as it is the case for Bitcoin. PrivateSend adds anonymity on transactions and so do not allow an external observer to decrypt all transactions. After each mathematics operation, earnings are dispatched between miner who obtains 45%, masternode 45% and 10% to DASH organization.
The second presentation was about Bug Bounty Factory platform. Manuel Dorne (Alias Korben: website) explained with several numbers the cyber security issue and different types of hackers which each company can meet with a public infrastructure (Balckhat and Whitehat).
The aim of the Bounty Factory website is to connect companies with IT security experts. Each company can create an account and charge money on the platform and wait for security bugs to be reported. When a security bug is reported the company decides of the criticality of this bug and determine the level of remuneration.
The main message of this presentation for the companies is, do not forget to consider security into information system before an important threat is discovered. When a vulnerability is found by an attacker the company will irremediably lose money, time, credibility and the image of the company will be impacted.
The third conference was a workshop organized by CAFIL (Conseil – Accompagnement – formations – Implémentation – Labellisation) Luxembourg association for small companies and focused on cybersecurity: “Escroqueries, cybercriminalité et espionnage industriel : les bonnes pratiques pour mieux se protéger” with the participation of Sandrine Becker from the Ministry of the Interior, specialized in economic protection and cyber security.
The aim of her intervention was to bring security awareness for managers / directors of medium and small enterprise. The speaker addressed several topics such as social engineering, phishing, metadata of pictures, mobiles with open wifi connection and Bluetooth. (CAFIL website: here)
Another speaker talked about the different positions and their roles and required talents to build a cybersecurity team.
The last conference of the day was with Christophe Galfard, physician and writer. He obtained his Ph.D under the direction of Stephan Hawking. The subject was, why is quantum transmission revolutionary?
In classic world, one of the cryptography goals is to guarantee the secret of a transmission from point A to point B but there is no solution to verify and guarantee the message has not be intercepted, unencrypted, read and encrypted again to deliver it to the receiver.
In quantum world, particles are in all states at the same time. When an action interferes on this particle, such as a measurement or a simple detection, the state of this particle changes from all states to a fixed one but undetermined until the interaction.
Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon which occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently of the state of the other(s), even when the particles are separated by a large distance. See the Schrödinger’s cat experience here.
The most well-known and developed application of quantum cryptography is quantum key distribution, which is the process of using quantum communication to establish a shared key between two parties.The concept is to use a random key issued from a pair of particles. This key will be linked together with entanglement quantum phenomenon. Both particles will be at the same time in all states and totally random (dynamic key), so we can imagine to use one of these particles to encrypt a message and use the second one to decrypt it. If the keys are intercepted by a third party, the state of the keys, particles, will change to a fixed state and the receiver will not be able to decrypt the message.
And as Richard Feynman used to say: “If you understood me, it means, I wasn’t clear enough”.
All conferences have been recorded and will be available very soon, you can visit #GEN Youtube page hereand official GEN website here.
