'Gas company' painting by Edmund Lewandowski
Gas Company by Edmund Lewandowski, 1937

Essay I: How could Heartbleed affect ITMO

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.

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Essay II: The importance of security on the web

Unlike the state of the web at the time of dot-com bubble in the end of twentieth century, the Web of nowadays become more sophisticated. The internet of the past was a popular place, so the early internet-oriented companies thought that the internet itself was the source of profit, but it wasn’t. Of course, their marketing fail was caused by misunderstanding the meaning of the Internet.

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Essay III: Developing secure software

Let’s face it – software security is underappreciated. That’s probably not the topic you want to discuss at your local IT meetup, and the last software security hype wave had happened in 2014, three years ago from now, and had been caused by Heartbleed. Just for comparison, there are only 938 software security meetups active now, against 11 823 web development meetups, as meetup.com reports. Just to clarify it, the web development hype waves are happened almost every day by new JavaScript frameworks and CSS standards improvements.

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Essay IV: Analysis of the effectiveness of 2-factor authentication

The classic computer science authentication methods may be assigned by three different categories: the key sequence checkers, the key items presence checkers, and identity analysers. In layman’s terms, the computer security systems should check what you know, what you have, and who you are. The old login-password authentication method is the typical “what you know” method. The access card systems may be assigned to “what you have” category, and of course the advanced, authentication methods that you may have seen in sci-fi movies such as the iris scanners, voice analysers, and fingerprint scanners may be classified as “who you are” systems, which is obviously ensures the most secure detection.

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Essay V: The role of government in software security

The governmental interests is, and was about keeping the army strong, and the people humble and compliant. With the exception of unviable philosophy-focused eastern zen states, that ancient rule firstly defined by Plato was in some different ways applied to any of the existed and existing states, including the modern ones. Anciently, the modern technologies were belonged to someone who got the power. Firstly it was the clergy with their early reading and writing the chronicles, when there were no people able to read and to write, and afterwards it were the kings, rich placemen, and the nobility.

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Essay VI: The future of the software security

Software engineers and teenagers has some things in common: they are both creative, driven by bright ideas and dreams about the better future. Them both are idealists and do love perfect things. Sometimes the dreams are being shattered by unworthy things like economics, marketing and managers’ opinion, but sometimes they are not. The greatest example though is an open source software case.

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