The RSA Conference is huge this year - they say 10,000 people, and I believe it. Quite a change from the 60-odd attendees in 1991 (though most of us are still pretty odd!).

I'm a bit disappointed that nothing has really caught my attention and excited me. It's nice to hear Adi Shamir likes the Rijndael algorithm used by the new NIST Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) which will be the replacement for the ancient (and broken) DES. But he did comment that the 10-14 rounds (depending upon key size) proposed, while sufficient to stay any known attacks, were probably insufficient to provide a solution that could last twenty years...

Overall, though, my cynical "executive" summary of the conference (and the field) is that while encryption techniques are getting better and stronger, attack methods and general user and developer/implementation errors seem to be increasing at a greater rate.