RSA CONFERENCE 2021 – The annual Cryptographers' Panel, moderated Monday by RSA chief digital officer Zulfikar Ramzan, brought together cryptographers Carmela Troncoso, assistant professor at EPFL; Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University and Edinburgh University; and panel mainstays (the R and S in "RSA") MIT professor Ron Rivest and Weizmann Institute professor of computer science Adi Shamir. (Another usual participant, cryptographer Whitfield Diffie, was not part of the panel but did a rapid-fire, one-on-one repartee with Ramzan.)
The discussions hit on machine learning (adversarial and otherwise), quantum computing, responsible vulnerability disclosure, COVID-19 contact tracing, supply chain security, cyber resilience, and a recently proposed algorithm for factorization that claims it could defeat the RSA cryptoystem.
Read on for a rundown of the most memorable quotes from the discussion.