RSA Conference: New perspectives
Our communities manager, Jon Ericson, was at the RSA Conference. Below are his reflections on the conference as a whole:
I attended several of the keynotes, including a performance by rapper Common, Ron Howard getting interviewed by his daughter Bryce Dallas Howard and Magic Johnson doing Magic Johnson things. More on topic for a security conference was From Gamer to Leader: How to Build Resilient Cyber Teams which suggested that people who play video games would be good candidates for becoming security professionals.
Lessons from AI Red Teaming – And How to Apply Them Proactively was presented by Daniel Fabian, Principal Digital Arsonist at Google. He explained that the attacker journey is like the user journey but for doing things you don’t want. So the goal must be to find ways to make the attacker journey harder.
In addition to the talks, the RSA Conference features an enormous expo hall. For a newcomer such as myself, the variety of booths and exhibitors was overwhelming. Ever vendor imaginable in the security space showed up and the OpenSSL Corporation had an especially busy booth. I suspect it was more effective than more extravagant offers such as the goats from some company I don’t recall.
Many of the booths featured AI solutions, security training, hardware vendors and security services. I had my eye open for other TLS vendors (WolfSSL), companies with a quantum computer angle (Quantinuum and QuintessenceLabs) and exhibitors associated with open source (Red Hat, GitLab and GitHub). With so many in attendance, there was something for everyone at RSA.
The RSA Conference is the world’s largest gathering of digital security professionals and I’m glad to have had the experience. As it happens, the world’s largest gathering of community professionals, CMX Summit, happened just down the road from RSA at the end of the week. I was not the only person who attended both conferences. Several speakers mentioned being at RSA and I noticed several of the RSA 2025 backpacks in the CMX crowd. I’ll leave you with a key takeaway from these conferences:
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