Robert Hettinga wonders ...
Did anyone go to the
"Worldwide Electronic Commerce Law, Policy, Security and Controls Conference" ?
It was in Bethesda October 18 - 20.
Just curious. Sponsored by a lot of Big Cheese (ABA, HLS, NIST, UNCITL, SPA, ETC, ETC, ETC).
I did and here's a view from IT; i.e. not law or marketing. The conference was two-track so by definition I only attended 1/2 the sessions. The high points ... - the Web will support commerce next year from modest (multi-$1,000) down to micro (sub-penny) transactions - the U.S. Government is trying to trade 64-bit keys for escrow but folks aren't buying it; Dorthy Denning gave a very weak "the sky is falling" talk. - Intel is building systems and secure infrastructure software; Microsoft may start to feel trapped between Intel and Netscape. - current copyright law seems up to the task of handling the Web but contract law may need some updating - iris scanning seems to be the leading biometric; there is a PCMCIA card that does fingerprints including pores which I learned are better than ridges for identification - nobody had any insight on transnational data flow, encrypted or otherwise - Verisign (a spin-off of RSA) is selling Digital IDs and running a Certification Authority; see http://www.verisign.com - the Swedes have a very aggressive Digital ID system on the air; see http://www.cost.se - X.509 seems to be the de facto and de jure certificate standard; current work is at ftp://NC-17.MA02.Bull.com in /pub/OSIdirectory/Certificates - RSA for encryption and DSA for signatures were the encryption technologies of preference; PGP was occassionally acknowledged to be one of the best available but strangely went undiscussed. Good quote: "Commercial DES (for export) with 40 bit keys is a joke. Don't even think about it." - other relevant URLs: www.ms.com www.terisa.com www.ssa.gov Most of the security focus of the conference was on authentication.