Moxie Marlinspike, who has drawn attention from the Internet security community for uncovering vulnerabilities that would allow an attacker to masquerade as any Web site and trick a computer user into providing sensitive communications, is a featured speaker at SUMIT_09, Security @ the University of Michigan in IT.

The event is presented from 7:45 a.m.-3 p.m. Oct. 20. at Rackham Auditorium by Information Technology Central Services.

Marlinspike is among six nationally known IT security experts scheduled to speak on current trends. The event is free, open to the public and will be streamed live at the Safe Computing Web site.

The annual event serves as an opportunity for both the campus community and the public to learn about IT security trends. The speakers are preeminent in their field, and cover a range of specialties including legal, government, corporate, higher education and the computer underground.

“The quality of the speakers positions SUMIT as one of the finest events of its kind in higher education,” says Paul Howell, chief IT security officer at U-M.

At a recent conference both Marlinspike and another researcher, who independently studied the processes for issuing Web authorization certificates, showed how an attacker can legitimately obtain a certificate with a special character in the domain name that would fool nearly all popular browsers into believing that attacker is whichever site he or she wants to be.

For more information on the conference, go to safecomputing.umich.edu/events/sumit09/.