Personal Bytes

I’ve been with Whitfield Diffie. Yes, the guy from the Diffie-Hellman cryptographic protocol that contributed to the public-key cryptography that we have today (also known as PGP).

He’s a very nice guy and he gave a presentation at Sun about the “End of Security”. He didn’t use any slides at all (he’s a very busy guy) but he did a better job talking to an audience than the majority of the guys that are actually paid to do presentations rather than working on algorithms. He managed to get the crowd absolutely focused on him and on his stories.

Basically he talked about the fact that security, at least as we see it today, is vanishing. He states that everyone is relying on services provided by third parties, being it Google, Yahoo, Salesforce or any other entity. That means that whenever you’re doing a query on Google you might be disclosing what you’re doing or planning on doing. Since companies can’t run a vertical structure anymore (with a few exceptions), they have to rely on the services provided by others and, by doing so, they’re letting a lot of potentially confidential information slip by.

His vision definitely makes sense and the purpose is more of a request for reflection that anything else, but he truly believes we will see a new shift in security paradigms due to the advent of the web services and outsourcing.