Important note of Jul 10, 2021: this article was originally published in 2017. The grammatical errors are intentionally left unfixed, and the article itself is republished for historical reasons.
ITMO University is trying hard to maintain its status of the best IT university in Russia. The university gained its worldwide popularity by winning the ACM ICPC competition multiple times with famous competitive programming trainers such as Andrew Stankevich, and equally famous students such as Gennady Korotkevich and others. ITMO has done a great job teaching and training students to help them in reaching that high proficiency level.
So what? Is just teaching students enough for ITMO to influent professional community and leave the footprint or to reach the level of worldwide recognisable number one IT university and stay that high forever? Of course, not.
You could tell the university is all about teaching people. Of course, the universities are made to be the place where you can grow from aspiring pupil up to verified professional ready for get the job and teach yourself the skills that the real professional tasks require you to master. But the modern university has not at all that kind of purpose. The scientific collaboration, new activities and the community contribution are the key factors for the university to become the one which is able to make you dream about study there, rather than to be the boring place that is all about square-toed lecturers and hard exams. That “best place to study” image is what ITMO aims to be, such as the other high grade universities. For example, the Stanford University launched Lagunita, the place where you can audit free courses and get certificates. Many of the others contribute to the professional community by making high-quality courses and publishing them to education platforms, such as Coursera and EdX. Of course, high amount of online auditors can advertise the university maybe the best possible way.
So what about how the Heartbleed could affect the university? ITMO got almost nothing to steal. What kind of useful information may university’s data servers contain? Students’ homeworks, schedules and progress logs? Or the important billing information for the paid plan students, so thief could steal some money? Why not go and hack some financial companies instead, e.g. PayPal and others, which had the same vulnerability back to that day? Of course, the university isn’t the best target to steal some money from. There’s still a room to argue of progress results manipulation, but shall we rather think about what the Heartbleed is about. The Heartbleed isn’t about modifying data but only about data stealing. The fact that the Heartbleed was discovered by Google, the company that made its revenue as high as $75 billion using online advertising can tell that the huge companies are way more interested in exploring widely used algorithms’ imperfections that the computer science specialists of the IT universities. Such a valuable contribution as being the first team who discovered the Heartbleed and maybe fixed it for everyone could be the ITMO’s shining crown of the university which discovered and fixed the Heartbleed. Of course, it could not have instantly make the ITMO University the number one place for students from all over the world who are interested in cybersecurity, but this glory of that russian Heartbleed guys could have stayed forever. Maybe, the hypothetical Heartbleed discoverage by ITMO, which is the Russian university, could have debunk the popular politics evil russian hackers myth, but that kind of discourse is the matter of other disputation. Anyway, that might-have-been fact may have had significant impact on the whole IT community.
Thus, the modern universities should not forget that first of all they are explorers. There’s still a lot of undiscovered bugs, design imperfections and objectives to work on. And of course, the open source world always needs proficient specialists to work with, and it’s always the labor to be proud for. So, maybe it’s better to teach students how to contribute to the open source instead of bother them with mock test tasks? The modern education could kill two birds with one stone that way: the test tasks may become more real and the students who contribute could make a good reputation to the university. But for now, that’s the matter of the future.
Thesis: ITMO got almost nothing to steal. ITMO’s contribution in Heartbleed fixing could prove the university’s highest level of education and allow the university to get the shining Heartbleed Fixers crown.
