[Infowarrior] - More researchers boycott RSA

[Richard Forno]

More researchers join RSA conference boycott to protest $10 million NSA deal

With seven weeks to go, at least 8 speakers cancel their RSA Conference plans.

by Dan Goodin - Jan 7 2014, 6:46pm EST

By Tuesday afternoon, there were eight previously scheduled RSA participants who had publicly cancelled their engagements. They included Adam Langley and Chris Palmer, both on various security teams at Google; Chris Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union; EFF special counsel Marcia Hoffman; Mozilla Global Privacy and Public Policy Leader Alex Fowler; Josh Thomas, who is listed as "chief breaking officer" at Atredis Partners; and Jeffrey Carr, CEO of security consultancy Taia Global. They joined F-Secure Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen, who announced his plans to withdraw two weeks ago.

"I've become convinced that a public stance serves more than self-aggrandizement, so I've pulled out of the Cryptographers Panel at RSA 2014," Langley wrote on Twitter Tuesday. "(I had already decided not to do it, but I pondered for a while whether I should say anything in public)," he wrote in a follow-up tweet.

Meanwhile, members of the Open Web Application Security Project are voting on whether to pull their previously planned developer training from the conference.

It has been three weeks since Reuters reported that RSA received $10 million to make the NSA-influenced Dual EC_DRBG the default algorithm for generating random numbers in the widely used BSAFE application. The revelation has generated howls of protest since Dual EC_DRBG is known to contain weaknesses and, according to The New York Times, may also have an NSA-engineered backdoor that makes wide-spread surveillance easier. RSA allowed BSAFE to use the algorithm for almost a decade and only removed it only after Ars asked if there were plans to do so.

In the three weeks since the $10 million deal was disclosed, the stock price of RSA parent company EMC has risen 2.8 percent, vastly outperforming both the Nasdaq and S&P indexes. The revelations may not be tarnishing the way Wall Street views the company, but they're beginning to have an effect on the prestige of its highly visible conference.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/more-researchers-join-rsa-conference-boycott-to-protest-10-million-nsa-deal/

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