BSidesSF reposted this
It was the first time I attended BSidesSF this year, wanted to share some impressions and take aways. The energy of the conference is unbelievable, you can bump into amazing people thinking and caring deeply about security and have meaningful discussions on tough topics. I enjoyed a couple talks on UX and security (Dylan Ayrey Hon Kwok Miccah Castorina), the topic that I feel is under-appreciated, leading to less than optimal security outcomes. Here I learned about Nielsen's usability heuristics and several interesting tools and sites (repokid, howtorotate.com, keyhacks). The highlight of the conference for me in the "talks" department was Maya Kaczorowski's session that touched on how to come up and evaluate security startup ideas, and 5 mini-pitches for products that don't exist yet (but should 😀). Another insightful session was "Insane in the Supply Chain: Threat modeling for attacks on AI systems" (Eoin Wickens Marta J.), showing that ML models are often not "data" (i.e. weights for the model) but "code", and so untrusted models should be treated accordingly. The mentioned talks will be posted soon on the #BSidesSF YouTube channel, check them out! Thank you to all the speakers, organizers and volunteers, I'll definitely be back next year.