First Jericho Forum Challenge winners announced

Researchers from a Swedish security software house have scooped the first Jericho Forum Challenge at the BlackHat convention in Las Vegas.

Tomas Olovsson & Jamie Bodley-Scott of Appgate won the prize for their paper, Balancing the Equation; Enterprises moving to the de-perimeterised world need to adopt a ‘core’ mentality based on controlled access to systems, which was one of eight papers submitted.

They proposed replacing a central firewall with a set of distributed firewalls throughout the network. These can be co-ordinated and managed from a central server but provide individual protection for users and applications and make them invisible to unauthorised people.

"Jericho is the result of the realisation that our perimeter protection model went away," said Gerhard Eschelbeck, chief technology officer of Qualys, which sponsored the challenge.

"The Jericho Forum Challenge is now an opportunity for vendors and researchers to listen to these end user requirements and respond with proposals, on how these security requirements for a deperimeterized world can be met."

The Challenge was set up to find tools that fit the Forum's idea of what computer security architecture is needed in three to five years time; flexible systems don’t rely just on building a security perimeter but on hardening of all levels of data. The group has an international membership broadly made up of security officers within corporations like the Royal Mail, Standard Chartered Bank and the BBC.

"I was really pleased with both the diversity of the papers received and some of the issues they raise and attempt to solve, as well as the some of the novel approaches taken," said Paul Simmonds, Global Information Security Director for ICI and the Jericho Forum member on the judging panel.

"While the Jericho Forum has succeeded in starting the debate on we need to seek out new an innovative ways on moving the debate forward."