Conferences

Although there are many other conferences, these are the ones you will probably find the most interesting from a firewalls and Internet security point of view.

USENIX Association Conferences

http://www.usenix.org/events/

The USENIX Association and SAGE sponsor a number of worthwhile conferences every year, including the USENIX Security Symposium, the USENIX System Administration (LISA) Conference, and the USENIX Technical Conferences. For information about any of them, contact USENIX:

The USENIX Unix Security Symposium is one of the best venues for learning about practical solutions to Unix and network security issues. From the announcement for the 1995 symposium:

The goal of this symposium is to bring together security practitioners, researchers, system administrators, systems programmers, and others with an interest in computer security as it relates to networks and the UNIX operating system.

Jointly sponsored by SAGE and USENIX, the USENIX System Administration (LISA) Conference is the premier conference for Unix system and network administrators. It covers a wide range of topics, including host and network security. If you are a Unix system or network administrator, and you get to go to only one conference a year, this should be it. From a LISA conference announcement:

The USENIX Systems Administration (LISA) Conference is widely recognized as the leading technical conference for system administrators. Historically, LISA stood for "Large Installation Systems Administration," back in the days when having a large installation meant having over 100 users, over 100 systems, or over one gigabyte of disk storage. Today, the scope of the LISA conference includes topics of interest to system administrators from sites of all sizes and kinds. What the conference attendees have in common is an interest in solving problems that cannot be dealt with simply by scaling up well-understood solutions appropriate to a single machine or a small number of workstations on a LAN.

The LISA-NT conference is like the LISA conference but focused specifically on the Windows NT environment. From a LISA-NT conference announcement:

The Large Installation System Administration of Windows NT conference, LISA-NT, is a forum to bring system administration professionals together to discuss workable solutions to the issues of administering and scaling all versions of the NT environment.

The main USENIX Technical Conferences are less focused on practical security issues than the Security or LISA conferences, but you can still learn a lot and make many valuable contacts there. If you have an opportunity to attend one, you should certainly consider it.

Unix System Administration, Networking, and Security (SANS) Conference

http://www.sans.org/

According to the conference documentation, this annual event:

. . . is a technical conference offering system administrators, security administrators, and network managers a unique forum in which to gain up-to-date information about immediately useful tools and techniques, in addition to sharing ideas and experiences and network with peers.

For information, contact the conference office:

Internet Society Symposium on Network and Distributed System Security (SNDSS)

http://www.isoc.org/

The Internet Society sponsors an annual symposium on network security. From the 1995 symposium announcement:

The symposium will bring together people who are building software and/or hardware to provide network and distributed system security services. The symposium is intended for those interested in the more practical aspects of network and distributed system security, focusing on actual system design and implementation, rather than on theory. We hope to foster the exchange of technical information that will encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of the available security technology.

For more information, contact the Internet Society: