The Netsec seminar is an advanced MSc-level course where students write a technical paper in English on a topic related to network security and present the paper in a two-day seminar in December. Each paper is assigned a tutor, many of which are university researchers and IT professionals from the local industry. Thus, the course is a great opportunity for students, TKK alumni and those working in the local industry or government departments to network and engage in security teaching at the university.

The theme for the autumn 2010 network security seminar is securing services on the Internet. The implementation of online services is going through a fundamental transition from simple client-server systems to cloud architectures, which promise to reduce cost and improve the scalability of the services but also require rethinking of many engineering aspects including security. Key technologies in this transformation are data centers, virtualization and distributed storage. Research projects also explore advanced architectures for content delivery. Applications are changing from standalone products to ones where functionality is distributed between mobile client devices and online servers. Moreover, applications increasingly take advantage of the social connections and sharing that are possible in the online world. These developments create great opportunities but also risks as the traditional security boundaries disappear and system isolation and data ownership need rethinking. The scalability mechanism needs to take into account denial of service threats, and the distribution of data creates issues with privacy and regulation. The network security seminar this autumn explores a broad range of topics related to the ongoing changes in the way online services are implemented and, ultimately, experienced.