The U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano was this morning’s keynote speaker at RSA Conference 2010, speaking about succeeding in the cybersecurity battle. She joins the list of prominent speakers this week, along with Symantec’s Enrique Salem on “Defeating the Enemy: The Road to Confidence”. The conference continues through the week, and you can keep up to date with links to interactive webcasts  here.

This year’s Cryptographer’s Panel discussed some interesting work on the new MD6 hash algorithm within the SHA-3 Competition, and MD5 as a ”dead hash algorithm”. This talk marked hopefully the last year of commercial Md5 use, in light of Md5’s fairly substantial and vulnerable use by vendors, webmasters and Certificate Authorities up through the beginning of 2009. May its death arrive quickly and a new, performance sensitive MD6 born soon.