The FORWARD paper seemed to spark interest in the conference which was mostly  dedicated to analyzing the benefits and applications of Trusted Computing. An interesting proposal posed by the audience was to move beyond technical analysis of future threats into investigating the economy and motives underlying the various malicious activities.

Apart from FORWARD’s paper, we found of particular interest Symantec‘s Richard Archdeacon presentation of today’s malware landscape. An interesting finding on their latest Internet Security Threat report is that the malware market has become much more streamlined than we imagine. Symantec identified trust chains between malware-suplier and malware-users which in some cases are formalized by means of End User Licence Agreements (EULAs), just like mainstream software is. They also hinted for a future switch from blacklisting to whitelisting for protecting from malware.

Overall, the conference was an interesting experience and we hope that FORWARD’s paper has managed to attract the interest of the very active trusted computing community for the project.