[LOPSA-US-AZ] RSA conference report

[der.hans]

Am 24. Feb, 2006 schwätzte Rik Farrow so:

> I suggested that people include trip reports about conferences attended,
> so am following through on my own suggestion.

Danke.

>  Shamir said that the discovery of collisions in MD5 and SHA1 hashing
>  algorithms is significant, but not a current cause for concern. That it
>  is possible to compute collisions of hashes is important, but because
>  getting this to work requires a set of random data, it is not important
>  for current uses of hashes (big sigh of relief there).

Not sure I undestand this. I think it's mostly saying that while there are
collisions, they're irrelevant for day to day operations because day to
day operations doesn't open itself up to the exploit. Is that close?

> Hellman said that security would be much better if more crypto was

Seems like an obvious statement to me :).

> used. I thought that he was completely ignoring the usability issues,
> for example, the USENIX published paper about how few people, out of
> a group of college students and professors, were actually able to PGP
> encrypt their email successfully.

I'm worried about the steps to make it usable for most people making it
also trivial to exploit the mechanisms.

> I then wandered the exhibit hall, usually my least favorite part. But
> for some reason, I found myself enjoying things more than usual. My
> interest was in finding companies using embedded Linux or BSD, and it
> only took a few minutes to discover Montavista, who supports Linux
> on embedded systems. They were in the Cavium booth, a company that

Montavista has a Phoenix office. The January PLUG east side presentation
was a Montavistite who started at the Phoenix office and was passing
through that week.

Deepak covered porting Linux to ARM. It was an interesting presentation.

ciao,

der.hans
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