LISA ‘04: Friday, part 1
Last day; sigh. This has been the first LISA I’ve been able to attend since 2000; it’s been loads of fun, not long enough, et cetera.
First session: papers, even though there were two interesting talks scheduled. (Yes, my rule is to go to talks instead of papers; one of the two was cancelled, and the other is apparently also being given at BBLISA in Boston in a couple months.) This was a set of security papers, and all three were interesting.
The first one was on how they set up a security game (challenging teams to secure their machines and crack into other machines) in a controlled environment, complete with a scoring system modeled on “capture the flag”. The second discussed how PlanetLab manages security given that they don’t physically control their machines, let users have root, and so on. Not my set of challenges, but they have a well-thought-out set of techniques that seem pretty solid to me. The last was on better ways to do automated tasks on multiple machines while maintaining least privilege, rather than having root-enabled ssh keys that can do anything. I can think of lots of uses for that.!
Second session: Simson Garfinkel’s talk on “Used Disk Drives”. Lots of fun examples of stuff that people didn’t actually delete, even in the cases where they thought they had erased the disk (hint: fdisk and format aren’t it).
Lunch, then the “Lessons Learned from Howard Dean’s Digital Campaign” talk. Tom Limoncelli’s talks are always fun, and the topic was interesting; what more could I have asked for? Well, not being scheduled against the Works In Progress session would have been nice, but that’s hardly Tom’s (or Keri’s) fault.
The last session of the day (and conference) is the LISA Game Show. I’ll report on that later; I’m in it, and by the time it’s over the wireless will no longer be available.
