Review of Confidence 2007
It was my first time at the Confidence Conference. I was invited a long time ago and asked to give a talk. Confidence takes place in Krakow, Poland. I flew there from Hamburg on thursday, May 9th. On purpose I flew there a bit early, to have time to walk around in Krakow on friday. Andrzej, one of the organizers of Confidence, picked me up at the airport. The organizers booked an apartment right downtown at market square. It was an awesome idea to have an appartment right there, instead of staying at the conference hotel. First evening we went out for food and drinks with some of the other speakers. Of course the organizers introduced us to the nice vodka poland has :). We went to a Jazz Bar and once the band was done playing, one of the other speakers went up to the drummer and started talking to him. Before we knew it, we heard a short, but very nice drum solo played by one of the speakers of confidence. Dinis Cruz is one of the brains behind OWASP.Throughout the conference Dinis and I had various very interesting discussions. Dinis gave a talk on ASP.NET Security. Since I usually avoid Windows territory, it was a very interesting talk indeed. Dinis has fair clue about Security Design, Handling security issues and the associated politics with it. As I said, lots of interesting talks we had.
Friday was spent mostly with walking around and meeting with people I knew from previous conferences.
Saturday the conference started, it was a tad chaotic, yet it was obvious that the organizers put lots of effort into this their conference. The agenda had quite a few interesting items on it. One of the talks that I reallly did not want to miss, was the talk on VoIP Security by Shawn Merdinger. However, it seemed that Shawn was missing in action. Turned out, someone gave him a tad too much of the goooood polish vodka :)
The talk was moved to sunday, right after my talk. Sadly, I had to give an interview after my talk so I missed it :/
Wim gave a talk about OpenBSD deployed on Soekris, it was entitled “Calorie restricted OpenBSD”.
My talk was on “Secure Roaming for the modern Roadwarrior”. For some reasons, I was not really able to focus on my talk (too much of the polish vodka too?), yet the people seemed to have liked it. I’ve put the slides online.
All in all Confidence is a very nice conference to attend, the organizers are trying to move it to be more international, speaker- and attendee-wise.
I’m very much looking forward to Confidence 2008, I will definitly be there.
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