My Experience at the FOSAD summer school.

During my week at FOSAD, two main things stood out to me: the location of the summer school and my fellow attendees. It felt surreal to be attending a summer school in a location like the Rock of Bertinoro, as I couldn’t really believe that I had been given the opportunity to attend something like this. Secondly, it was fantastic to meet other PhD students and postdocs from around Europe. It was interesting to discuss their research as well as hear about their experiences on their programmes. It really made me feel connected to the community in general and I’m hoping that this experience will help to prepare me for attending conferences in the future.

Over the week, there were a total of eight lectures, as well as nine PhD talks. There were two talks which I found partially interesting, one by Aggelos Kiayias on Blockchain protocol modelling and security proofs and one by Daniel Gruss on Micro-architectural attacks. For Aggelos’s talk, it was fascinating how he approached breaking down and understanding the blockchain protocol. With Daniel’s talk it was interesting to hear what had led to the creation of these attacks as well as the number of different mitigations which had been proposed, including one by his team which has not been implemented. During the PhD forum, I presented my work, which I found a lot more enjoyable than my previous presentation at CyberMi2. Of the other talks, three stood out to me: one by Mahshid Mehr Nezhad on Security Analysis of Mobile Point-of-Sale Terminals, one by Koen Teuwen on the Automation for Security Operations Centers, and another by Christina Ovezik looking at Blockchain Decentralization - A Stratified Approach.

Overall, my experience at FOSAD was very enjoyable and one which I would recommend to others.