The first education forum of the Security Research Alliance, formed in January this year by four of the IT world’s giants, is to be hosted at the second Internet Security Conference (TISC) in San Jose, California. The Research Security Alliance – whose founding members are Cisco Systems, Lucent Technologies’ Bell Laboratories, Network Associates and Sun Microsystems – will hold the education forum, which it calls Crystal Ball Symposiums on April 20 at the Fairmont Hotel, where the conference is being held from April 19 through April 23.
The professed objective of the alliance is to accelerate the development of security technology – by cooperative efforts such as the peer review of research findings – and to promote the understanding of that technology among the IT professional community. The crystal ball symposiums are intended to achieve the second of these objectives.
The elite group is open to new membership, but only one new member, GTE Government Systems, has so far been accepted. Membership requires that companies meet certain pre-established criteria (CI No 3,587) and that their application is approved by existing members. Around 45 companies, including Intel Corp, are known to have applied and some have been rejected on the grounds that they do not satisfy all criteria.