MANILA -- A research paper presented by Filipino students bested 12 other finalists from various countries in the preliminary round of the Kaspersky Lab Asia Pacific and Middle East, Africa (MEA) Cup 2012.
The paper presented by team leaders 21-year-old Joshua Arvin Lat and 19-year-old Ranyel Bryan Maliwanang, won the first and second prizes at the event, which was held last March 14 to 16 at the City University of Hong Kong (CityU).
Lat and Maliwanag, who are both students from the University of the Philippines-Department of Computer Science (UP-DCS), said they carried out their researches of the department's Computer Security Group.
The top research paper written by Lat and his partners Kevin Charles Atienza and Rod Xavier Bondoc titled "SOUL Sytem: Secure Online USB Login System," recommended a secure online authentication system involving a two-factor authentication scheme using a password and an ordinary USB flash drive as a security token. The group took home US$1,500 for their winning paper.
Meanwhile, Maliwanag and his team, composed of Mariah Strella Indrinal and Marynyriene Silvestre, created an application that uses voice recognition. Their research titled, "Vox-Grid: A Mobile Voice Verification System," which proposed a mobile voice verification system to improve the security of the username-password authentication scheme, won for the group a US$1,000 cash prize.
Third place winner was the research paper titled "Mining Modules' Dependencies for Malware Detection" by Masoud Narouei from the Shiraz University of Iran which won for him a cash prize of US$750.
This is the first time the Philippines joined the annual conference, which has this year's theme of "IT Security for the Next Generation."
Their wins in the event earned for Lat and Maliwanag their respective spots to represent the Philippines in the 2012 Kaspersky International Cup of the IT Security Conference for Young Professionals to be held at the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands from May 11 to May 13, 2012.
Kaspersky Lab, which is an annual contest for students and young professionals on battling the scourge of cyber crime, is sponsoring the all-expense paid trip of the team leaders to the global round.
The Filipino students will be competing against the winners of three other regional preliminary rounds held in America, Europe and Russia & Commonwealth of Independent States.
Lat and Maliwanag stand a chance to win the cash prize of 3,500 euros plus the opportunity of an internship at Kaspersky Lab or a visit to a professional Information Security conference together with the company's experts.
The UP students competed with tertiary and post-graduate students from the Asia Pacific, Middle East and African regions.
Veniamin Ginodman, head of Kaspersky's Educational Programs management, said selection of the winners were based on scientific and methodological level of work, the social importance of the topic presented, completeness, objectivity with collected information, as well as practical and innovation value in different areas ranging from technical, social, economic to legal topics.
"The quality of papers presented was of a very high standard with much thought and creativity having been put into the content," Ginodman said.
Kaspersky Lab is the world's largest privately-held Internet security company, providing comprehensive protection against all forms of IT threats such as viruses, spyware, hackers and spam. The company also provide in-depth computer defense for more than 300 million systems around the world, including home and mobile users, small and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises. (AH/Sunnex)