This year's RSA Conference will be coinciding with another security event – TrustyCon – that reached capacity about six days after it was announced.
The convention was established by those boycotting the RSA Conference after reports began surfacing in late-2013, based on leaked documents, that RSA entered into a $10 million secret agreement with the NSA to use a flawed algorithm as an NSA backdoor.
Some of the industry's biggest names will be speaking at TrustyCon – which will be held at the AMC Theatre at the Metreon in San Francisco on Feb. 27 – including Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for F-Secure, Christopher Soghoian, a security and privacy researcher, and Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and security specialist.
“Confirmed attendees and sponsors have voiced their desire to be a part of the event and collaborate on ways that we – as individuals, small businesses, companies, and as a national industry – can solve security issues in tech,” Alex Stamos, TrustyCon creator, said in a release. “TrustyCon provides them a platform for their voice.”
TrustyCon is a collaboration of iSEC Partners, DEF CON and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and is sponsored by organizations including CloudFlare and DigiCert. Microsoft previously announced that it would sponsor the event, but as a sponsor of the RSA Conference, the computer company was required to back out, according to a Wall Street Journal blog post.
In December 2013, RSA quickly denied entering into a $10 million secret agreement with the NSA after Reuters published a report based on leaked documents.
It was previously revealed in September 2013 that all versions of RSA's BSAFE Toolkits were impacted by a community-developed encryption algorithm that was believed to contain an NSA backdoor.
The algorithm in question was Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (Dual_EC_DRBG), which both RSA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommended the industry not use at the time.
