07 February 2007

Bill Gates takes leave of RSA conference

Brian McKenna, at RSA in San Francisco

In a low-key joint address to the 2007 RSA conference, Bill Gates and Craig Mudie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, signalled the end of a five year phase in the company's security drive.

Gates acknowledged Mudie's role in motivating him to write the famous 2002 memo announcing the trustworthy computing initiative at Microsoft.

"When we started we know it would be a big task", said Gates. "A big cultural change has taken place at Microsoft", issuing in Vista, the supplier's most secure operating system to date.

The duo invoked the shift to data protection that many in the industry argue has to take place. "People want 'anywhere, anytime' access", said Gates. "We can't use the glass house paradigm of logical isolation anymore", he added.

"The castle is porous", continued Mudie, in a now-common deprecation of the fortress model for security. Moreover, he said, "the information asset has to be protected all the time".

Policy not typology has to drive network security, he added. And he stressed an ambition to enable more and more granular information sharing between companies.

IPv6 was the background hero to the presentation. Microsoft has, internally, been using IPSec and IPv6 more to secure its information systems over the last three years.

Gates echoed his 2006 RSA speech's declaration of the obsolescence of passwords. He also reported that Microsoft is supporting Web 2.0 initiative 'Open Identity 2.0', and joining it with the supplier's CardSpace capability.

Asked if Microsoft were now significantly happier with how the vendor is perceived in the security community, Kristin Johnsen, senior director of security outreach, Microsoft, said: "we are less distressed".

Meanwhile John Thompson, chair and CEO of Symantec took a few sideswipes at Microsoft in his keynote address. "We must not assume that a more secure operating system will protect us against future threats", he said. He also won the audience's approval by declaring that for a company to provide an OS and secure it too was "a conflict of interest". Those who "keep the books should not also audit them", he said.

Mudie revealled that this would be Bill Gates' final RSA keynote. His company's trustworthy initiative seems to have closed a chapter. "We've stopped counting now", was how Kristin Johnsen put it.

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