Well, I am back in Hamburg again. The days in Tokyo were a blast. The city is as overwhelming as I imagined it to be. PacSec itself was great as well. I saw many intriguing talks and met tons of cool people. There was not much content that directly related to my area of research (mine was the only websec talk and, with the exception of Ben Chelf’s presentation of Coverity’s technology, software security was not too dominant as well). Not that this matters as the good thing about going to conferences is that one gets exposed to topics that are not necessarily right up one’s alley.

With three talks on the subject, there was quite a focus on IPv6. I especially liked Yuji Ukai presentation on scanning IPv6 networks and fingerprinting v6 network stacks. Arnaud Ebalard and Guillaume Valadon talk on mobile IP was also very cool, but I only did understand about one third of what they were explaining. So many abbreviations, so little time. Fortunately their live demo of a mobile IPSec tunnel helped to get the big picture. Another focus was on Microsoft and Microsoft related technologies. All Microsoft guys were experienced and professional speakers that managed to avoid the obvious traps of vendor talks. Furthermore, Philippe Lagadec taught us about the pitfalls in the new office XML formats and Marc Schoenefeld gave a first introduction on possible future issues with Mircosoft WCF. As usual, the lightning-talks were my favourite part of the event. Fast, chaotic, entertaining. I wish the time would have allowed a few more (the interpreters had to leave punctual).

In one of the breaks, I got the chance to talk to Window Snyder (Mozilla Corp.'s Chief Security Foo). I tried to convince her that the topics I am working on (JS malware, CSRF, XSS exploitation, etc.) are the most pressing issues right now and that the http/browser paradigm needs a thorough overhaul urgently. However I got the subtle impression that she did not quite agree. Too bad.

If you are interested to get a visual impression, visit the flickr account of Ryo, the conference’s official photographer. I also made a couple of pictures but they are mostly boring tourist shots of Tokyo.