I’m very proud to announce that Dr. Whitfield Diffie will give the keynote address at S4, January 24 - 25. Even better, Whit will participate in S4 so all physical attendees will have an opportunity to talk over crypto and SCADA security issues with one of the legends in the crypto world.  Don’t be surprised if he asks you a lot of questions - - he is very inquisitive and conversations often spin off into other directions and lead to new ideas.

Whit, along with Marty Hellman, invented public key cryptography in 1976 and his Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm still is widely used.  Almost every security product and protocol, SSL, IPSec, …, use public key crypto for key exchange, authentication and non-repudiation.  It is not an exaggeration to say that without public key cryptography Internet ecommerce may not have happened because the old symmetric key exchange would not have scaled.  Read more about Whitfield Diffie on Wikipedia or see a profile from Wired magazine.

Whit may seem a non-obvious choice for the S4 keynote.  We considered inviting a leader from DHS, Dept. of Energy, or a large asset owner, but S4 is primarily a research event.  In addition to inventing public key, Whit was a real leader in moving crypto from the shadows to the public in a constructive manner through facilitating a vibrant research environment and community. 

In the 1980’s cryptology was a science studied almost exclusively in intelligence organizations and isolated pockets of individual researchers.  There were a small number of product vendors with proprietary crypto algorithms, little crypto was in use, and a large amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) distorted the crypto issue.

Potential users were hesitant to purchase and deploy cryptology because there were few protocols and algorithms vetted by peer review.  Each potential user had to be a cryptanalyst to evaluate if the security was any good.  Product vendors were hesitant to integrate security into their products because there was no agreement amongst potential customers on what constituted an appropriate level of security. And the governments, well they just hoped that cryptology would remain a mystery.

This should sound eerily familiar to anyone in the SCADA security community. 

We invited Whit to be the keynote to share his experiences and wisdom on how the crypto community overcame those problems as a leader in that effort.  He will also provide thoughts on what the SCADA security community can do to learn from this to accelerate the progress and overcome the hurdles.

S4 Full Agenda

S4 Physical and Virtual Registration