ICMC: Welcome and Plenary Session

Congratulations to Program Chair Fiona Pattison, atsec information security, for putting together such an interesting program for this inaugural International Cryptographic Module Conference.   She has brought together an amazingly diverse mix of vendors, consultants, labs and NIST.  People from all over the world are here.

Our first keynote speaker is Charles H. Romine, Directory, Information Technology Laboratory, NIST. Mr. Romine started off his talk by noting how important integrity and security is to his organization.  Because of this, based on community feedback, they've reopened review of algorithms and other documents.  Being open and transparent is critical to his organization.

NIST is reliant on their industry partners for things like coming up with SHA3.  They are interested in knowing what is working for their testing programs and what is not working, hopefully they will get a lot of great feedback at this conference.

Because these validations are increasingly more valuable in the industry - demand for reviews have gone up significantly. How can NIST keep the quality of reviews up, while still meeting the demand? Mr. Romine is open for feedback from us all.

Our next keynote was Dr. Bertrand du Castel, Schlumbeger Fellow and Java Card Pioneer, titled "Do Cryptographic Modules have a Moat?"

Dr. du Castel asks, is the problem with cryptography simply key exchange? Or is it really a trust issue?  With things like bitcoin (now taxed in Germany) and paypal everywhere on the Internet - it should be obvious how important trust is.  He walked us through many use examples, using humorous anecdotes to demonstrate that the importance of trust is growing and growing.


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