Getting Secure @ RSA 2008…thoughts from San Francisco
April 17th, 2008 by Brian Berger
Welcome back to the TCG blog! In addition to celebrating its fifth year, TCG also has had a busy week in San Francisco, one our favorite cities, at the RSA 2008 Conference. As evidenced by the apparently added-on exhibit areas, packed food vendors and jam-packed sessions, this event apparently is continuing its role as one of the bigger IT events.
As far as TCG…we are marking our fourth year of a fairly significant presence. When we first started with RSA, we offered to host a session on what used to be a “dead” Monday. We were bringing in more chairs that year and have continued to offer a standing room-only session the show now calls “pre-conference” content…Attendees coming in on Sunday now can fill Monday with actual work rather than sightseeing!
This year we hosted an interactive workshop. Instead of just presenting yet another slide deck, we divided a large room into 4 classrooms – one for Trusted Network Connect NAC, one for storage security and two focused on the TPM and how to use it. Attendees grabbed a sandwich at noon and then headed into the session of their choice.
After 45 minutes or so, we switched, so everyone had a chance to visit all 4 classes. Each one was full . We got lots of great questions about setting up the TPM, what to do with it, how to manage large numbers of TPM-enabled boxes and how the TPM leverages existing applications.
Over in TNC land, our enthusiastic instructors demonstrated how to keep the bad guys off the network and how to evaluate the health of those trying to jump on – with products that are available today and that many might already have.
And our friends in storage covered a lot of group by talking first about local storage security – i.e. Solving the lost laptop problem and associated costs/risks. They then did a dive into the enterprise storage area – showing new enterprise storage with full drive encryption based on TNC standards.
As soon as we’d answered the many Qs, we broke down and hustled to the show floor for the 6 pm opening – we had all the workshop demos from Juniper Networks, Seagate, Wave and Infineon there as well as a few new ones. Fujitsu joined us with a neat demo of TNC linked to palmprint biometrics for authentication! Identity Engines, which ships an open source supplicant for NAC, showed its capabilities for protecting the network
