Olovsson and Bodley-Scott scoop Jericho Forum challenge honors

Tomas Olovsson and Jamie Bodley-Scott won the competition at the annual Black Hat conference Las Vegas, Nevada.

Competitors were asked to write papers which contributed to the Jericho debate, the belief that network security should move away form the perimeter and down to the data level.

"Nearly ten papers were submitted by various individuals and corporations for the Jericho Forum Challenge," said Gerhard Eschelbeck, CTO of Qualys who was on the judging panel. "Jericho is not about reinventing some technology, but is a system architecture that supports the security requirements for a deperimeterized world."

According to Paul Simmonds, global information security director at ICI and another of the judges, the competition ignited healthy debate about a wide range of Jericho topics.

"We were very pleased with both the diversity of the papers received and some of the issues they raise and attempt to solve, as well as the novel approaches taken."

Accodring to Simmonds the papers, which included submissions on identity and access management, secure messaging and safer scripting, will be used in future Jericho Forum workgroups.

In April SC reported a leading member of the Jericho forum had threatened to leave if the lobby group did not become more than just a 'talking shop'. The member suggested Jericho only had six months to transform words into actions.