I spent all of last week at the RSA conference in San Franciso. It was a little disappointing though. I was expecting it to be more of an academic conference such as USENIX, but it was very corporate in nature.

To give it credit, there were a few highlights: The cryptographer’s panel with Bruce Schneier, Adi Shamir, Paul Kocher, Ron Rivest, and Whitfield Diffie; The Closing keynote with PJ O’Rouke; the two cryptographer’s track sessions I went to, a session on hacking VM machines and a session on analysing topologies of trust. The sessions mentioned (other than the Keynotes) were suprisingly technical, and what I expected from RSA. The other sessions that I attended and didn’t mention above were very overview and managerial type tracks. I wasn’t expecting that since the technical rating of “most” of the other tracks I attended was a 4 or a 5 out of 5.

I did learn a lot of information from the interesting sessions I attended. I have a whole list of web sites and papers that I want to go look up and read more about. There was one statement in particular that I found interesting, and if anyone else has more direct experience with this than I do, please let me know: but apparently, if one RSASignature() is computed incorrectly (the old cosmic ray), then the private key can be discovered (research by Boneh, et al.). I’ve been searching Google and Citeseer since I got back, and I can’t find the paper where this is described – not that I’d understand it much once I found it, but I could certainly find someone to ask questions of!

While I was there, the afternoon keynotes left a lot to be desired, so I went wandering the city of San Franciso and I took lots of pictures. They’re up in my gallery for anyone to look at, but I haven’t bothered to caption all of them yet. That’s on the todo list for after I’ve studied for my Japanese quiz tonight.

The city was interesting, I think I could handle living there, but I don’t think I’d have to worry about Weight Watchers any more, I’d get all the exercise I needed walking up and down hills. Whether I could afford to live in the city of San Francisco is a completely different can of worms.