This week, I’m blogging from RSA Europe in London. The conference is dedicated to Alan Turing, the great British cryptographer and early computer scientist. The folks at Bletchley Park teamed with a local hobbyist to bring an Enigma machine and other cryptographic machines to the conference. I had a great time playing with the Enigma.

Attendance at the show was down a bit from last year, probably due to the poor economy. Still, there was a good crowd for my talk on “NAC 2.0″ this morning. I explained how NAC systems are starting to integrate with other network security systems like IDS and DLP. This trend is really starting to accelerate now that IF-MAP has been released, providing a standard way for these integrations to happen.
One more note. The Bletchley Park folks are appealing for donations to help save their historic site, an important part of cryptography and information security. If you’d like to donate, visit their site at http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk or stop by and see the machines for yourself. If you can’t make it to England, go to the U.S. National Cryptologic Museum in Maryland. They have a similarly amazing collection of spy gear albeit in a less historic setting.
Tags: General, NAC Standards, RSA, Appearances, NAC, standards, steve
Last week, I spoke about the TNC standards at Interop Tokyo. Then I went back to the TCG booth and talked with Japanese government and enterprise customers, researchers, manufacturers, and reporters about TCG technology. There’s an amazing amount of support for TCG technologies in Japan! On the flight home, I reflected on how far we’ve come in the last few years and what lessons we can draw from this growing wave of support for TCG standards.

A few years ago, TCG technologies like TPM and TNC were only concepts being discussed by a few people. How could we have trustworthy devices and networks? Now these technologies are globally accepted and widely used. Millions of people have a TPM in their laptop and a TNC client in their operating system. Organizations such as the U.S. Department of Defense require a TPM in every PC. How did this come about? Open standards unleashed the awesome power of human innovation and communities.
Open standards are not enough. There are many thousands of standards, most of which are unsuccessful. Successful standards solve a specific set of problems but allow extensions to encourage innovation and meet special needs. That’s what the TPM and TNC standards have done. And that’s why these standards have flourished. Vendors and customers see value in implementing the basic standards and opportunity in the many ways they can extend these standards. Eventually, communities of interest grow up. The TCG just announced the Japan Regional Forum, a place for Japanese discussion and promotion of TCG standards. This demonstrates the power of open standards.
Think about TCP/IP or WiFi. Having a single set of common standards has enabled a huge amount of innovation with products like the iPhone or iKan. That’s what TPM and TNC do: create an open platform for innovation and adaptation. Once that platform is established, then it’s just a matter of getting everyone on board and letting the innovation begin. The value of a standard is proportional to the square of the number of implementers. That exponential power is really starting to take off for TPM and TNC and other TCG technologies!
Tags: General, NAC Standards, general