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 |  Subject: Excellent: Prestigious speaker Mikko Hypponen cancels RSA talk to protest NSA deal  Tue Dec 24, 2013 2:27 am | |
| Friday's report that RSA received $10 million to make an NSA-favored random number generator the default setting in its BSAFE crypto tool aren't yet creating any problems on Wall Street, with stock for parent company EMC rising 2 percent on Monday. That doesn't mean the revelations don't have important public relations fallout for the encryption software maker.
On Monday, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of Finland-based antivirus provider F-Secure, publicly canceled the talk he was scheduled to deliver at the RSA Conference USA 2014, which is slated for February. A highly sought-after security researcher who regularly speaks at Black Hat, Defcon, Hack in the Box, in addition to the more mainstream Ted and South by Southwest conferences, Hypponen said his cancellation was in protest of the recently revealed $10 million contract to make the NSA-influenced Dual EC_DRBG BSAFE's default pseudo random number generator (PRNG). Hypponen also cited RSA's decision to keep Dual EC_DRBG the default PRNG for more than five years after serious vulnerabilities were uncovered in it and Monday's non-denying denial from RSA in response to Friday's report from the Reuters news agency.
"I don’t really expect your multibillion dollar company or your multimillion dollar conference to suffer as a result of your deals with the NSA," Hypponen wrote in an open letter to Joseph M. Tucci and Art Coviello, the CEO of EMC and the executive chairman of RSA respectively. "In fact, I'm not expecting other conference speakers to cancel. Most of your speakers are American anyway–why would they care about surveillance that's not targeted at them but at non-Americans. Surveillance operations from the US intelligence agencies are targeted at foreigners. However I'm a foreigner. And I'm withdrawing my support from your event."
The cancellation and a flurry of critical comments on Twitter and other social media were in sharp contrast to the considerably more blasé reception on Wall Street. EMC's share price rose 53 cents, or 2.16 percent, to $25.07 in trading Monday, compared with a 1-percent rise in the Nasdaq and a 0.45-percent increase the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It will be interesting to track the long-term effect that Friday's report will have on the fortunes of RSA and EMC. It's possible the outrage over the NSA contract is limited mainly to engineering and security circles that are insulated from the people who decide how their companies spend money.
Then again, Hypponen may be only the first of many influential people who are about to part ways with RSA. It's worth watching to see if his prediction that most speakers already scheduled to speak—especially those from the US—go forward as promised. RSA Keynote speakers include executives from Microsoft, McAfee, Symantec, Cisco, and Juniper. RSA's website also shows 408 speakers, some from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other NSA critics.
By the way, the title of Hypponen's canceled talk? Governments as Malware Authors
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/12/prestigious-speaker-mikko-hypponen-cancels-rsa-talk-to-protest-nsa-deal/ |
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