The RSA Security Conference that took place in the first week of March was bracketed by two women who don't have much connection to security. The main keynote session on Tuesday morning started with the lights going down, and then the announcer's voice in the darkness saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dame Helen Mirren" and a single spotlight came on and there she was. It was a complete surprise, she wasn't scheduled in the program.

I think she is most famous in Britain for playing Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison in the Prime Suspect series (plural), and The Queen in The Queen. She also, when much younger, starred with Bob Hoskins in my favorite British movie The Long Good Friday. It came out in 1980 and so is nearly 40 years old. It was the first movie made by HandMade Films, which was basically George Harrison (they would go on to make Monty Python's Life of Brian, too, when EMI backed out less than a week before filming was meant to start.

Helen Mirren delivered a pep-talk to the assembled security experts. There were apparently well over 40,000 people attending, although obviously, not all in the auditorium that morning. But she told us:

The collective brilliance of this conference has addressed major world problems. Together you stop the cyber underworld from growing beyond our control.

Thank you for all you do.

At the other end of the conference, the closing "keynote" is traditionally Hugh Thompson, the RSA Program Chair, interviewing someone interesting. This year it was Tina Fey, most famous I guess for "doing Sarah Palin better than Sarah Palin did", and for Liz Lemon on 30 Rock.

They talked about improv and how important "yes... and" is, to keep the sketch going, and a bit about how 30 Rock was written and filmed, given that she had a small child (who grew older and became two children during the series). I did not know that she was Greek. Her actual name is Stamatina.

The Trust Landscape

Next up on opening day, after a brief post-Helen interlude with the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir, was Rohit Ghai, the President of RSA with Niloofar Razi Howe. They wanted us to imagine it's 2049. It is the bio-digital era. We still have water. We still have trust. But:

People are probably still losing money on Bitcoin.

They observed that there is peer-to-peer trust where "people started to invite strangers into their homes and cars". But trust in institutions declined. In their imagined future:

By 2025, more than half of Americans had lost faith in democracy.
Leaders of FANG were interrogated by Congress—by a tech-savvy Congress

Needless to say, that produce a lot of laughter after Congress's laughable interrogation of Facebook and Google.

As the concept of the perimeter vanished, cybersecurity experts needed to take a risk orientation to protect what matters most. Assume every actor is malicious. Never trust, always verify. But this became an impediment.

The domains of cybersecurity and risk management converged. Most code was written by machines, and every piece of code is capable of patching itself. Most physical assets are built in a local manner with 3D printing. AI became the lightning rod of distrust because it cost jobs. It was never designed to operate in an adversarial environment. 

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not learn from the future are doomed not to be in it.

We are at the largest cybersecurity conference in the world. We still have water, we still have trust. Let's make sure we don't run out.

The Cryptographers' Panel

The big event of the opening morning of RSA is always the cryptographers' panel. I will cover this in a post later this week. Just to whet your appetite, this year's panel was:

• Ronald Rivest, the R of RSA.
• Whitfield Diffie, legendary cryptographer.
• Paul Kocher, who discovered both differential power analysis, and one of the first varieties of the Spectre vulnerability of speculative execution in microprocessors.
• Tal Rabin, manager of the cryptographic research group at IBM, and also (earlier in the morning) the RSA Conference 2019 Recipient of Annual Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics.
• Shafi Goldwasser from the Simons Institute for the theory of computing.
• The moderator was Zulfikar Ramzan, CTO of RSA (the company, not the conference)

Director of the FBI

Christopher Wray, the Director of the FBI, wrapped up the morning, in discussion with Susan Hennessey of the Brookings Institution. I will cover that in a separate post later in the week since I think it is important. Whether you agree or disagree, Christopher is the director of the FBI and so his opinion is important in a very different way from a random expert cryptographer commenting on cryptographic policy.

Bruce Schneier

Later in the week, Bruce Schneier, one of the most well-known cryptographers due to his books, blog, and email newsletter (since 1998) took a different perspective from what Christopher said. Look for my post on that talk later this week too.

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