RSA Conference 2012

This weekend the 2012 RSA Conference begins! I am looking forward to a busy week. Every day is essentially booked from 7am to midnight. I hope to see many of my friends at what has become an annual pilgrimage to San Francisco each spring to catch up on information security trends and technology.

For me, the focus will be on security metrics and risk management, because I’ve got a talk (Monday morning) and a panel (Wednesday morning), and a half-day seminar (Thursday afternoon) on these topics. It seems the big security issues for 2012 are: Cloud, Mobile, Social Media and Big Data.

I am on another CISO panel at noon Thursday, talking about these security trends. I have been thinking about Big Data for a while now. I find it a fascinating subject – maybe because of my science research background (in a previous life). From the consumer perspective, embedded systems and networked systems are all around us. Data is being collected on your spending habits, Google collects data and with social media, your life is increasingly in the public domain. Now, our cars, tractors and toasters are going to be networked nodes, sending data where you drive, what you plant and how dark you like your bagels back to corporations who will horde it and manipulate it and aggregate it. Security data is coming from standard network devices in the enterprise: the firewalls, routers, IDS… and it is merging with information gathered from badge readers and other “physical security” sources to build up a model of what is “normal” for you… a new biometric, “What You Do”. All together, we are looking at mountains of data, and these data sets need to be pared down, while manintaining their integrity, manipulated and analyzed in an ethical and confidential way. This is cool stuff, Maynard!

See you in San Francisco!