Feb. 18, 2004 - Whitfield Diffie, Steve Hanna, and the Next Generation Cryptography Group (Sheueling Chang, Vipul Gupta, Hans Eberle and Nils Gura), are representing Sun Labs in the most prestigious information security event of the year--the Thirteenth Annual 2004 RSA Conference in San Francisco, February 23 through 27.

RSA Conference 2004

This Conference is the premier event for organizations that deploy, develop or investigate data security or cryptography products. IT professionals, developers, policy makers, industry leaders and academics gather there to share information and exchange ideas on technology trends in areas relating to:

• identity theft
• hacking
• cyber-terrorism
• biometrics
• network forensics
• perimeter defense
• secure web services
• encryption

Sun Labs Presents

• Demonstrations of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) occur Monday, Feb. 23 though Wednesday, Feb. 25, at Sun Microsystems, Inc. Booth, #1021. ECC is a public-key cryptosystem recently endorsed by the U.S. Government. Because it employs smaller keys and utilizes system resources more efficiently, ECC can be used in constrained environments where traditional public-key mechanisms like RSA are simply impractical.
  
• Tuesday, Feb. 24, the inventor of public-key cryptography, Whitfield Diffie, Sun Fellow and Chief Security Officer, serves as a member of the most popular panel at the Conference, the Cryptographers' Panel.
  Diffie and members of the panel discuss the government's national security strategy, the latest security products from the Conference floor, and the most recent cryptographic developments out of academia.
  
  
• Also on Tuesday, Steve Hanna of Sun Labs' Internet Security Research Group, speaks on "XACML: Scalable Access Control." XACML is a standard access control policy language with many features that avoid incompatibility problems that confront system administrators.
  
  
• Wednesday, Feb. 25, Whitfield Diffie, Sun's Chief Security Officer, and Jonathan Schwartz, Executive Vice President of Sun's Software Group, present the Keynote Address, "It's Not Just About Security ..."
  Diffie and Schwartz advocate that the industry needs to: 1) start focusing on ideas that can prevent attacks by "designing in" capabilities of systems and users, thus limiting the harm that can occur; and 2) increase the focus on identity, authentication, permission and access control.
  
  
• Also at the Conference: Introducing the PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) Action Plan
  In addition to his research activities at Sun, Steve Hanna of the Sun Labs Internet Security Research Group, is a co-chair of the OASIS PKI Technical Committee.
  The Committee is working to identify and address the primary obstacles to PKI deployment and usage. Based on results from surveys and dialog with PKI stakeholders, the OASIS PKI Technical Committee has prepared a PKI Action Plan that lists the obstacles identified through the surveys and proposes specific actions to address them.

Sun supports this effort as part of its long standing commitment to open standards as a way to reduce cost and complexity for its customers.

The 13th annual RSA Conference delivers more learning, networking, and product demonstrations than any other security gathering. To take advantage of this opportunity to learn about fresh approaches and creative solutions, and to meet security decision makers and technology luminaries, register here.