Fergie's Tech Blog

Black Hat: NSA: 'We're from the government. Help us.'

William Jackson writes on GCN.com:

The National Security Agency, whose initials once seemed to stand for No Such Agency, is moving from being a proprietary to an open-source organization. Sort of.

Information technology security and information assurance is becoming too critical, too big and too complex a problem for the government to address by itself, Tony Sager, chief of NSA's Vulnerability Analysis and Operations Group, said Wednesday in an opening address at the Black Hat Briefings computer security conference.

"We've got to figure out how to solve this problem with solutions that scale across the entire community," Sager said. That means his agency has to bring its information to the table and find common ground with the private and academic sectors. "'We're from the government and we're here to help' doesn't work with this crowd."

Although much of NSA's work remains secret, Sager's group is a reflection of the need to develop open and standardized security and research practices.

posted by Fergie @ 8/01/2007 03:13:00 PM