Trusted Computing Group

The official theme of this week's RSA Conference is "The Adventures of Alice & Bob." Cartoon figures pop up in videos and graphics, illustrating the eternal battle between the white hats (Alice & Bob) and the black hats (Mallory). Like a Cold War spy movie, The Adventures of Alice & Bob is an entertaining caricature of a disturbing truth. Cyberattacks continue to grow, now threatening the livelihood of every person on earth. But entertaining videos won't solve this problem.

The real theme of the RSA Conference should be Collective Defense. Around the world, a realization is dawning. Nobody can solve their cybersecurity problems alone. We're all interdependent, on several levels. First, we depend on IT staff to build secure systems for our company and to manage them well. Second, we are dependent on our customers, partners, and suppliers to secure their own systems. And third, these dependencies ripple up and down the supply chain, linking all organizations like a series of dominos. If your suppliers or customers go down, your organization will too. We must all work together to improve our collective security. This message applies across all boundaries around the world.

The theme of Collective Defense is repeated throughout the RSA Conference. At the Trusted Computing Group's full-day seminar on Monday, several panels of vendors, customers, and analysts will talk about how they're working together to build trusted information systems, raising the bar for cybersecurity. On Tuesday, Scott Charney will give a keynote speech on Microsoft's vision for collective action to build a more secure information ecosystem. This theme of Collective Defense is echoed again and again throughout the conference program, across keynote speeches and track sessions.

So everybody's talking about the need for Collective Defense. What are we doing about it? The National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) will hold a Town Hall Meeting at lunch on Tuesday to discuss how the public and private sector are working together and how we can do more. Immediately after that, a track session (PNG-106) will drill down to the details of this topic. And the (ISC)² will host a training on Wednesday if you'd like to volunteer teaching cybersecurity to kids in your community.

If you're coming to the RSA Conference, I encourage you to come to these events. If you can't make it to San Francisco this week, view the white papers and online videos on the TCG, Microsoft, NCSA, and (ISC)² web sites. Working together, we can do much more than any one of us alone.