Cryptography Can't Foil Human Weakness

Enhanced security can solve many issues, but it can't improve the thing that sits between the keyboard and the chair—the user—a cryptographers' panel concluded Tuesday. The panel, a staple of the RSA Conference here, invited four of the industry's luminaries on stage with Bruce Schneier, author and chief technology officer at Counterpane Internet Security, to discuss the evolution of cryptography. The discussion soon turned to recent failures in information security, however, including the recent leak of some of Microsoft Corp.'s source code and the knotty security problem of social engineering.

Each panelist—Whitfield Diffie, chief security officer at Sun Microsystems Inc.; Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist at Cryptography Research Inc.; Ron Rivest, Viterbi professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Adi Shamir, professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel—came to the panel with his own view of security priorities. Rivest, for example, was concerned with the policy of security., Diffie, on the other hand, said the industry was shaping up for a battle over DRM.