Prof. Nirmal Roberts who had been a Principal Computer Engineer at IIT Kanpur and presently
a faculty member at IIITM Gwalior conducted a session on Information Systems Security in the
Institute.
Prof. Nirmal has great knowledge in the area of Computer and Storage Networks, Network
Management, Information Systems Security, Operating Systems and IT Infrastructure.
The session begun with a simple understanding of what user authentication means and then
the session proceeded with the intricacies of the whole system of client server architecture and
how important is the need of User authorization and Authentication in organizations dealing
with Information Systems. Today every organization has a IT infrastructure and the need of the
hour is proper administration of its resources. Chief Information officers’ role was also exploited
in the session which involves driving the analysis and re-engineering of existing business
processes, identifying and developing the capability to use new tools, reshaping the enterprise's
physical infrastructure and network access, and identifying and exploiting the enterprise's
knowledge resources. The whole process is backed with a secure information system and this
can be well explained with a small example like the need of keeping or using a strong password
and how to protect critical data in an organization.
The students got an insight into the whole process of user authentication and its various types
like setting up user id and passwords, tokens, static biometric and dynamic authentication.
We often come across articles about choosing strong passwords to forego the risk of data leak
and misuse, the session proceeded with a detail mathematical explanation of how the whole
process of authentication works. The use of Hashing functions to create hash codes which
make it difficult to guess what a password of a person is.
Other ways of data compression or the ways large number of user id and passwords which
can be stored in databases were discussed which included the N-gram model which is a type
of probabilistic language model for predicting the next item in such a sequence in the form of
a (n − 1)–order Markov model. The N-gram model as Prof. Nirmal explained today is widely
used in communication theory and statistical natural language processing and other fields of
computational biology and data compression. The main advantage of the n-gram model is the
fact that it has the ability of scaling up to a large extent by storing more data in a limited space.
Prof. Nirmal also discussed various attacks like the Dictionary attacks and Brute Force attacks
and techniques to deal with these kinds of attacks.
The concept of cryptography was introduced to the students and techniques like password
salting were explained. The session concluded with the ways one could create strong
passwords in a simple manner and protect his data. The role of the network administrator in an
organization was emphasized and the students were able to understand the importance of data
integrity and confidentiality.
