La parole est aux speakers : Chris Riley

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La conférence

The secrets of Cryptography

Alice and Bob have secrets they want to talk about without Eve being able to listen in. Worse yet, the mischievous Mallory delights in changing messages sent between parties. In such a hostile environment how can Alice talk to Bob without their messages being overheard and how can she be sure that it was Bob that sent the message in the first place? This talk will take a brief look at historic codes and ciphers before taking a look at modern day Cryptography. If you want to be able to know the difference between a block cipher and a stream cipher or get a glimpse into the mathematics behind public key Cryptography this talk is for you.

What’s your background in cryptography? how did you discover it and why did you decide to study it?

I’ve always been fascinated by cryptography and cryptanalysis and despite having studied it during my university course, it’s more of an occasional hobby than something I do professionally. Although historic ciphers can be broken easily by anyone who’s good at solving puzzles, modern day cryptography requires a heavy background in maths which makes it harder to get into and why it remains mostly a hobby for me.

It obviously isn’t required that anyone wanting to use cryptography needs a PHD in maths though, it is possible to study and understand the algorithms that are used even if you don’t have the ability to create your own and break other peoples. A basic understanding of the underlying algorithms and ways of breaking them can help you avoid issues when using them and allow you to have a bit of fun when something a bit easier does come along such as my analysis of hashids.

For you, what is (or should be) the place of cryptography in modern web development ?

In modern web development, most cryptography use should be fairly transparent to most developers, for example all web servers will implement https for you, the standard libraries present in all modern languages have abstracted away making secure connections as well. The main times a developer will likely encounter cryptography in their work will be when handling sensitive users personal information, I think in the future we will see a greater push for ensuring that this data is properly protected both from government and the users themselves. As every application has different needs and use cases for the data, there will be times when developers will need to handle encrypting this data themselves to ensure it is held securely.

Your’re from Yorkshire in England. How is the PHP community here ?

I live in York and the nearest usergroup is about 20 miles away in Leeds which is probably the main one in the area. I’ve also recently started up a conference: PHP Yorkshire we had a very successful first event this year and have planned the next event for April 2018.

What other fields of programmation do you like beside cryptography ?

I describe myself as a software architect more than a developer and I like to get involved in the none functional side of software development covering: performance, security, robustness and maintainability, so a lot of the work I do and topics I talk about draw from these themes.

How did you hear about the AFUP?

Most conferences and usergroups I hear about first via twitter.

Une conférence présentée par

Chris RILEY
Chris RILEY
Chris is a freelance consultant based in York, Uk with experience working in the public sector, small and large companies throughout North Yorkshire. Chris has over 10 years experience with PHP and has a keen focus on both software architecture and none functional requirements such as security, performance and maintainability. In his free time, Chris can often be found producing or playing with experimental libraries and contributing to Zend framework.

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