Anti-RSA Brigade Set Up Rival TrustyCon Conference

Security and privacy professionals have set up a trust-based conference to rival the RSA Conference, which they are boycotting over an alleged deal between the EMC-owned company and the US National Security Agency.

TrustyCon will be held on 27 February at AMC Metreon in San Francisco, which is located just down the road from the Moscone Center where RSA Conference is taking place between 24 and 28 February.

Opposing RSA

Renown security experts, such as F-Secure’s Mikko Hypponen and Google software security engineer Chris Palmer, will be talking at the event. Hypponen and a host of others had already announced plans to boycott RSA Conference over a Reuters report that suggested the NSA had paid RSA $10 million to include flawed code in one of their random number generators.

Others, including Jeffrey Carr, founder of security firm Taia Global, and the head of cryptology at Cambridge University, have called for a total boycott of RSA technology because of what it allegedly did with its Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generation (Dual-EC-DRBG).

iSEC Partners, a security consulting firm, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and DEF CON have come together to set up TrustyCon, while Microsoft and CloudFlare will provide sponsorship.

“The disclosure of this deal has affected the trust individuals and companies place in the government and technology companies and has struck a chord among businesses and consumers,” the release on the new conference read.

“It raises concern regarding the ways the industry may profit from relationships with the government and whether international clients can trust their security providers.

“TrustyCon serves as a call-to-action to companies to design their technology and businesses to be secure and trustworthy.”

RSA had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.

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