I don’t often talk about my job specifically, but I’m very proud to be employed by Red Hat, working as Chief Security Architect, a role based in the Office of the CTO[1], and sometimes it’s the right time to talk about job-related stuff. Next week is our annual Summit, and this year it’s in Boston[2], starting on Tuesday, 2019-05-07. If you’re coming – great! If you’re thinking about coming – please do! And if you’re not able to come, then rest assured that many of the sessions will be recorded so that you can watch them in the future[3].
There is going to be a lot going on at Summit this year: including, I suspect, some big announcements[4]. There will also be lots of hands-on sessions, which are always extremely popular, and a number of excellent sessions and other activities around Diversity and Inclusion, a topic about which I’m extremely passionate. As always, though, security is a big topic at Summit, and there are 50 security topic sessions listed in the agenda[5] (here’s the session catalog[ue]):
- 26 breakout sessions
- 11 instructor-led labs
- 7 mini-sessions
- 4 birds-of-a-feather sessions (“BOFs”)
- 2 theatre sessions
These include sessions by partners and customers, as well as by Red Hatters themselves.
Many of my colleagues in OCTO will be presenting sessions in the “Emerging Technology” track, as will I. My session is entitled “Security: Emerging technologies and open source”, and on Tuesday, at 1545 (3.45pm) I’ll be co-presenting it with my (non-OCTO) colleague Nathaniel McCallum. The abstract is this:
What are some of the key emerging security technologies, and what impact will they have on the open source world? And what impact could open source have on them?
In this session, we’ll look at a handful of up-and-coming hardware and software technologies—from trusted execution environments to multi-party computation—and discuss the strategic impact we can expect them to have on our world. While individual technologies will be discussed (and you can expect a sneak peek demo of one of them), the focus of this session is not a deep-dive on any of them, but rather an architectural, strategic, and business view.
I’m trying to ensure that when I talk about all of these cool technologies, I talk about why open source is important to them, and/or why they are important to open source.
Here’s the particularly exciting bit, though: what’s not clear from the abstract – as it’s a late addition – is that Nathaniel plans to present a demo. I can’t go into details at the moment, partly because we’re keeping it as a surprise, and partly because exactly what is demoed will depend on what Nathaniel’s frantic coding manages to achieve before Tuesday afternoon. It’s one of the early results from a project we’re running, and I can tell you: a) that it involves TEEs (trusted execution environments); and b) that it’s really exciting. I’m hoping that we can soon make more of a noise about it, and our Summit session is the start of that.
I’m hoping that the description above will be enough to convince you to attend Summit, but in case it isn’t, bear in mind the following:
- there will be keynotes from Jim Whitehurst (Red Hat CEO), Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO) and Ginni Rometty (IBM CEO)
- the Summit party will feature Neon Trees[6].
There are lots of other great reasons to come as well, and if you do, please track me down and say hello: it’s always great to meet readers of this blog. See you in Boston next week!
1 – “OCTO” – which, I guess, makes me one of the Octonauts.
2 – the picture at the top of this article is of Fenway Park, a place in Boston where they play baseball, which is like cricket, only quicker. And you’re allowed to chuck the ball.
3 – in case, for any crazy reason, you’d like to see me speaking at last year’s Summit, here’s a link to the session: Getting strategic about security
4 – this should not be interpreted as a “forward-looking statement”, as I’m not privy to any particular definite decisions as to any such announcements. Sorry – legal stuff…
5 – I’m indebted to my colleague Lucy Kerner, who’s organised and documented much of the security pieces, and from whom I have stolen copied gratefully reused much of the information in this article.
6 – I’ve only just clocked this, and my elder daughter is going to be very, very jealous when she gets back from school to discover this information.
Alice, Eve and Bob - a security blog 
Good luck Mike.
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