Cyber has become a hot topic in the recent years; and there is an acute shortage of skilled personal in this area.Just like other technologies, cyber has negative (like creating malwares), and positive (like fighting those malware) aspects.In teaching these capabilities it is sometimes hard to distinguish between the two sides and to get the positive outcome without giving dangerous weapon to the students.The solution we'll present in the talk is to use riddles to give the relevant knowledge and practice, without crossing the fine line between a good cyber-security researcher and a malicious black hat hacker.We will give several such riddles, which were used over the years in programming competitions like IEEEXtreme; in CTF (Capture The Flag) like CSAW; etc.
Prof. Oded Margalit earned his PhD in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University in 1993, under the supervision of Professor Zvi Galil. His professional experience contains, among others: Machine Learning; Constraint Satisfaction Programming; and Formal Verification, Currently, he is the CTO of IBM’s Center of Excellence in Beer Sheva and a full professor adjunct to the computer science department at Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He also the author of IBM research’s Ponder-This monthly challenge site. An avid riddle and puzzle maven, Margalit has been known to focus this passion on setting up contests and challenges for coding, puzzle-solving, and mathematical challenges.