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RSA Conference, Day 1
Feb. 15th, 2005 08:43 pmAnd now, for my write-up of day one of the RSA conference.
I woke up at a bright and early 6:50 A.M., so as to have time for breakfast before the conference. I had breakfast in the hotel (oatmeal and danishes), and walked through the ubiquitous pouring rain (forecast for every day this week -- torrential downpour!) to the convention center, where I discovered they had complimentary breakfast (albeit sans oatmeal.) The conference began with a sort of play/sketch/thing about a Prohibition-era codebreaker, a woman who cracked codes used by bootleggers. Apparently each RSA Conference (this is the 14th) has a theme around cryptography or cryptanalysis in history, and the Prohibition era is this year's. After that we moved on to the RSA Awards, of which there are only three, and they were given to the head of the Federal Trade Comission and two guys I'd never heard of. On the bright side, all of this only took 35 minutes.
The first keynote address was given by none other than Bill Gates. The address was not very interesting to me as a Microsoft employee, what with it consisting entirely of things I've been hearing for six months, but I'm sure it was enlightening to other attendees at the conference. You can no doubt read about this one in any news website by now; when Bill Gates says anything it tends to make the news, even if it's about computer security. He demo'd Microsoft AntiSpyware, which is actually a very cool product.
The second keynote was by Art Coviello, the CEO of RSA Security (the conference's primary sponsor.) He spoke about identity and authentication. Specifically, he encouraged a federated identity model for the Internet in which a web of trust allows authentication anywhere. This is kind of cool in theory, but my opinion is that it will never work, and will join global PKI and anonymous electronic cash in the pile of things with better cryptographic theory than economic theory.
The third keynote was by John Thompson, the CEO of Symantec. He used his keynote to make several criticisms of Microsoft, which I didn't mind since they were entirely valid (one of them was that Bill Gates's keynote was really more of a product roadmap and a sales pitch -- which it was -- and the other was that Microsoft is not likely to be a first-tier security vendor for non-Windows-based systems -- which it isn't.) He talked about intrusion detection and active response in enterprise networks. I can't really say my thoughs on the matter due to the fact that they all involve Microsoft confidential information, so I'll stop here. However, I will say that Thompson is an engaging speaker and I enjoyed his presentation; his was the best of the keynote addresses so far.
This was followed by the Cryptographers' Panel, in which Ron Rivest (the "R" in RSA, a major public key cryptosystem), Whitfield Diffie (the Diffie in Diffie-Hellman, a major key exchange protocol), and two other famous cryptographers (Paul Kocher and Adi Shamir) who are apparently not as famous as Rivest and Diffie since I'd never heard of them, came together to discuss cryptography. Primarily they looked at predictions made by Rivest and Diffie in Cryptographers' Panels from 5-15 years ago, and either marveled at how true they were or laughed at how wrong they were. Diffie and Rivest had of course been at basically all previous Cryptographers' Panels, because it would be a shame to have something called a Cryptographers' Panel and not invite someone as entertaining as Diffie. While this presentation was not remotely useful to me in a job sense, it was very entertaining to listen to for crypto nerds "talk shop."
After that was lunch; I went out for Indian food with Sarah and Himani, two people from my team. I had Chicken Tikka Masala, my usual non-adventurous but really good Indian food, and regretted the lack of naan bread.
( Almost incomprehensible security geekness follows... )
I had intended to have dinner with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
microgrl after the last presentation, but she's apparently gotten violently ill since last night and thus missed today's conference altogether. She thinks it's food poisoning, but this seems unlikely since not only did I eat the same thing as she did last night, but it was all assorted appetizers so I was eating from the same plates. Well, whatever the cause, I hope she feels better soon and I don't get whatever she has. :) So I went with Sarah and Narsi for dinner, and had more Indian food. This time I ordered the naan bread that I had so missed at lunch. I then proceeded to eat too much Indian food, which I am now regretting.
Overall, a good and interesting, albeit very tiring, day. I'm looking forward to the next few days of conference, but I'm also looking forward to being home with my wife.
I woke up at a bright and early 6:50 A.M., so as to have time for breakfast before the conference. I had breakfast in the hotel (oatmeal and danishes), and walked through the ubiquitous pouring rain (forecast for every day this week -- torrential downpour!) to the convention center, where I discovered they had complimentary breakfast (albeit sans oatmeal.) The conference began with a sort of play/sketch/thing about a Prohibition-era codebreaker, a woman who cracked codes used by bootleggers. Apparently each RSA Conference (this is the 14th) has a theme around cryptography or cryptanalysis in history, and the Prohibition era is this year's. After that we moved on to the RSA Awards, of which there are only three, and they were given to the head of the Federal Trade Comission and two guys I'd never heard of. On the bright side, all of this only took 35 minutes.
The first keynote address was given by none other than Bill Gates. The address was not very interesting to me as a Microsoft employee, what with it consisting entirely of things I've been hearing for six months, but I'm sure it was enlightening to other attendees at the conference. You can no doubt read about this one in any news website by now; when Bill Gates says anything it tends to make the news, even if it's about computer security. He demo'd Microsoft AntiSpyware, which is actually a very cool product.
The second keynote was by Art Coviello, the CEO of RSA Security (the conference's primary sponsor.) He spoke about identity and authentication. Specifically, he encouraged a federated identity model for the Internet in which a web of trust allows authentication anywhere. This is kind of cool in theory, but my opinion is that it will never work, and will join global PKI and anonymous electronic cash in the pile of things with better cryptographic theory than economic theory.
The third keynote was by John Thompson, the CEO of Symantec. He used his keynote to make several criticisms of Microsoft, which I didn't mind since they were entirely valid (one of them was that Bill Gates's keynote was really more of a product roadmap and a sales pitch -- which it was -- and the other was that Microsoft is not likely to be a first-tier security vendor for non-Windows-based systems -- which it isn't.) He talked about intrusion detection and active response in enterprise networks. I can't really say my thoughs on the matter due to the fact that they all involve Microsoft confidential information, so I'll stop here. However, I will say that Thompson is an engaging speaker and I enjoyed his presentation; his was the best of the keynote addresses so far.
This was followed by the Cryptographers' Panel, in which Ron Rivest (the "R" in RSA, a major public key cryptosystem), Whitfield Diffie (the Diffie in Diffie-Hellman, a major key exchange protocol), and two other famous cryptographers (Paul Kocher and Adi Shamir) who are apparently not as famous as Rivest and Diffie since I'd never heard of them, came together to discuss cryptography. Primarily they looked at predictions made by Rivest and Diffie in Cryptographers' Panels from 5-15 years ago, and either marveled at how true they were or laughed at how wrong they were. Diffie and Rivest had of course been at basically all previous Cryptographers' Panels, because it would be a shame to have something called a Cryptographers' Panel and not invite someone as entertaining as Diffie. While this presentation was not remotely useful to me in a job sense, it was very entertaining to listen to for crypto nerds "talk shop."
After that was lunch; I went out for Indian food with Sarah and Himani, two people from my team. I had Chicken Tikka Masala, my usual non-adventurous but really good Indian food, and regretted the lack of naan bread.
( Almost incomprehensible security geekness follows... )
I had intended to have dinner with
microgrl after the last presentation, but she's apparently gotten violently ill since last night and thus missed today's conference altogether. She thinks it's food poisoning, but this seems unlikely since not only did I eat the same thing as she did last night, but it was all assorted appetizers so I was eating from the same plates. Well, whatever the cause, I hope she feels better soon and I don't get whatever she has. :) So I went with Sarah and Narsi for dinner, and had more Indian food. This time I ordered the naan bread that I had so missed at lunch. I then proceeded to eat too much Indian food, which I am now regretting.Overall, a good and interesting, albeit very tiring, day. I'm looking forward to the next few days of conference, but I'm also looking forward to being home with my wife.
