Major cyber security forum coming to New Zealand

23 January 2017

Major cyber security forum coming to New Zealand

The annual International Organization for Standardization (ISO) event, responsible for cyber security international standards such as the ISO/IEC 27000 series, is coming to Hamilton in April this year.

Hosted by USA-based Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) on behalf of Standards New Zealand and supported by the University of Waikato and Tourism New Zealand, the 28th ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27 Plenary and Working Group Meetings will be held at the University of Waikato from 18-25 April 2017.

Event co-convenor and University of Waikato Head of Cyber Security Lab Dr Ryan Ko says the event will bring about 400 cyber security experts from around the world together.

“This cyber security event is one of two held each year by Swiss-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and helps shape how the industry moves and operates,” says Dr Ko.

“The SC 27 working groups create and manage prominent international security and privacy standards such as the ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO/IEC 27018, which are used to evaluate the best practices of major organisations. With the support of Tourism New Zealand, we were able to win the hosting bid ahead of prominent member nations such as China. This is a great achievement for New Zealand cyber security on the global stage.”

ISO is an independent, non-governmental international organisation with a membership of 163 national standards bodies, which are the foremost standards organisations in their countries with only one member per country. ISO standards are developed by groups of international experts with standards being developed in response to requests from industry or other stakeholders such as consumer groups.

Dr Ko, who is the principal investigator of the six-year $12.2 million MBIE-funded project STRATUS, says participation in the ISO standardization activities are important to ensure STRATUS’ cyber security products meet a recognised international standard. STRATUS aims to create a suite of security tools, techniques and capabilities that return control of data to Cloud computing users.

Now in its second year, STRATUS - Security Technologies Returning Accountability, Trust and User-centric Services in the Cloud - is a team of leading cloud security researchers and practitioners from University of Waikato, University of Auckland, Unitec Institute of Technology and Cloud Security Alliance.

Dr Ko has recently returned from ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27 Working Group Meetings in the UAE where he was elected as an editor for ISO/IEC AWI 21878 in the cyber security international standards committee SC27. Dr Ko also promoted the New Zealand event to SC 27 with Master of Cyber Security student Craig Scoon.

In April 2015 Dr Ko submitted a new project proposal for a new cyber security standard “Security guidelines for design and implementation of virtualised servers”. It usually takes six years for a standard to go from proposal stage to be adopted as an international standard.

ENDS

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