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List:       e-lang
Subject:    [e-lang] Talk: Whitfield Diffie on InfoSec and Seth Schoen (EFF) on Palladium...
From:       "Jeff Crilly" <jlc () myrealbox ! com>
Date:       2003-11-10 8:57:35
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(I came across this tonight, and thought it may interest the elang folk....)
Website: http://www.sdforum.org/SDForum/Templates/CalendarEvent.aspx?CID=1233&mo=11&yr=2003


Date of Event : Wednesday, November 12 2003,  7:00 PM
Registration Time : 6:30 PM
Location : Nokia Internet Communications, Mountain View


Presenters

Whitfield Diffie (bio), Vice-President and Fellow - Sun Microsystems
Seth Schoen (bio), Staff Technologist, Electronic Frontier Foundation


InfoSec Presentation Overview

The first trans-Atlantic radio transmission a century ago gave rise to the modern \
field of information security. We will look at its progress in its first century and \
speculate on its direction in the next century.


Palladium Presentation Overview

Microsoft's Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB or Palladium) will be \
included in a future version of the Windows operating system. Employing a unique \
hardware and software architecture, NGSCB will create a protected computing \
environment inside of a Windows PC-a "virtual vault" that will sit side by side with \
the regular Windows environment to enable new kinds of security and privacy \
protections for computers.

NGSCB is a key milestone on the journey towards Trustworthy Computing, and it is up \
to developers and security professionals to ensure that we arrive at the right answer \
for the digital community -- One that balances the user's own privacy, the computer \
owner's control, computer security, and the protection of Intellectual Property \
rights.

EFF's position is that it may be helpful to add hardware features to the PC to \
improve security, but improving security should always be seen as a matter of \
enhancing the platform owner's knowledge of and control over the state of the \
platform. It should not be stretched to include enforcing policies against the \
platform owner or giving third parties information which helps them enforce policies \
against the platform owner. Current trusted computing design proposals have gone \
astray by including support for security models in which the platform owner is \
treated as an adversary; as a result, these features will be abused to the detriment \
of computer owners. This problem can be remedied easily by adding features to help \
platform owners override policies they disapprove.


About The Presenters:


First Speaker: Whitfield Diffie -Sun Microsystems
Whitfield Diffie is vice-president and Fellow at Sun Microsystems, where he has been \
employed since 1991. As Chief Security Officer, Diffie is the principal exponent of \
Sun's security vision and is responsible for developing Sun's strategy to achieve \
that vision.

Best known for his 1975 discovery of the concept of public key cryptography, Diffie \
spent the 1990s working primarily on the public policy aspects of cryptography and \
has testified several times in the Senate and House of Representatives. His position \
- in opposition to limitations on the business and personal use of cryptography - is \
the subject of the book, _Crypto_, by Steven Levy of Newsweek. Diffie and Susan \
Landau are joint authors of the book _Privacy on the Line_, which examines the \
politics of wiretapping and encryption and won the Donald McGannon Award for Social \
and Ethical Relevance in communications Policy Research and the IEEE-USA award for \
Distinguished Literary Contributions Furthering Public Understanding of the \
Profession.

Diffie is a fellow of the Marconi Foundation and is the recipient of awards from a \
number of organizations, including IEEE, The Electronic Frontiers Foundation, NIST, \
NSA, the Franklin Institute and ACM.

Prior to assuming his present position in 1991, Diffie was Manager of Secure Systems \
Research for Northern Telecom, where he designed the key management architecture for \
NT's PDSO security system for X.25 packet networks.

Diffie received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts \
Institute of Technology in 1965, and was awarded a Doctorate in Technical Sciences \
(Honoris Causa) by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1992.


Second Speaker: Seth Schoen -Electronic Frontier Foundation
Seth Schoen is one of the lead developers of the LNX-BBC rescue system (formerly the \
Linuxcare Bootable Business Card). He worked as a Senior Linux Consultant at \
Linuxcare for two years; he has also been an intern at Toronto Dominion Bank and at \
the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His long-time interest in civil liberties \
led him to his current position as Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier \
Foundation, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco. He has been active in \
the Bay Area free software community since he moved to the Bay Area in 1997 from \
Massachusetts.

Seth has been studying trusted computing for over a year, conducting over a dozen \
meetings with Microsoft, Intel, AMD, and representatives of the former TCPA and \
current TCG promoters, as well as independent experts. Seth prepared EFF's position \
on trusted computing.

Based in San Francisco, EFF is a donor-supported membership organization working to \
protect our fundamental rights regardless of technology; to educate the press, \
policymakers and the general public about civil liberties issues related to \
technology; and to act as a defender of those liberties. Among our various \
activities, EFF opposes misguided legislation, initiates and defends court cases \
preserving individuals' rights, launches global public campaigns, introduces leading \
edge proposals and papers, hosts frequent educational events, engages the press \
regularly, and publishes a comprehensive archive of digital civil liberties \
information at one of the most linked-to websites in the world: http://www.eff.org


Event Logistics
Location
Nokia Internet Communications
323 Fairchild Dr.
Mountain View, CA 94043


Agenda
6:30-7:00pm registration/networking/refreshments/pizza
7:00-9:00pm presentation and discussion


Cost
$15 at the door for non-SDForum members
No charge for SDForum members
Free to TiE members during the months of Nov/Dec.
Please call 408.494.8378 for student memberships
No registration required

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