A seminar on Guessing a Random Pass-Key was conducted jointly by PagaTI (TI India Technical University), VLSI Society of India, and IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Bangalore Chapter on October 1st, 2010. The speaker was P. Rajesh Sundaresan, Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. The seminar was related to the security aspect in modern communication networks and how hackers may be able to guess the passwords.

Dr. Rajesh Sundaresan explained how to count the expected number of guesses needed before success grows exponentially with the length of the key-string. He pointed that the goal should be to characterize the growth rate exponent and on that lines, the problem of guessing is closely related to compression. He spoke about applications in the analysis of the strength of secret-key crypto-systems against guessing attacks. The seminar also included a discussion on an asymptotically optimal randomized attack.

The seminar was attended by about 25 people, including members and non-members of IEEE/VSI. Refreshments were served to the participants of the seminar.