Cryptography & Smalltalk
presentation
Martin Kobetic: Cincom
Monday 9:15:00 am to 10:00:00 am
Abstract: Recent eruption of security consciousness in the IT industry promoted cryptography from a geeky toy of particularly paranoid computer junkies to an everyday reality for the majority of computer users. Cryptography is just a small part of the arsenal of security professionals today, nevertheless a fundamental one. Thorough understanding and proper use is absolutely critical for any cryptographic solution. Seemingly minor issues can utterly destroy any security properties of an application.
Complexity and misunderstanding is often the culprit behind of all too frequent failures to deliver secure software solutions. Superior expressivity of Smalltalk along with its inherent suitability for agile development methods like TDD provides us with unique opportunity to address many of those issues in an efficient and reliable way.
This presentation is meant to spark the interest of smalltalkers and to motivate them to add cryptography to their arsenal and hopefully profit from this opportunity. It is primarily a practical introduction to cryptography using the Visual Works Security library, but the concepts that will be covered apply to any cryptographic library regardless of the environment or even programming language.
Small "cryptlets" will demonstrate critical properties of various algorithms and techniques. Discussion of practical aspects of a "100% Smalltalk" solution in contrast with alternatives will complement the instruction.
Bio: Martin Kobetic is a member of Cincom Smalltalk development team working primarily on various networking frameworks (Opentalk, DST, Web Services) and the security library. Prior to that he worked on TOPLink for Smalltalk at The Object People, Canada and on various internal frameworks at ArtInAppleS, Slovakia. He presented at Smalltalk Solutions several times on various topics, notably TOPLink, Opentalk and CVST.
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