The decision comes amid reports regarding RSA's deal with the NSA

Dec 27, 2013 09:25 GMT  ·  By

Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure’s chief research officer and a world-renowned security expert, has decided to cancel his talk at the RSA Conference USA 2014, an event scheduled to take place in February, in San Francisco.

Hypponen’s decision comes shortly after a report that brought to light a $10 million (€7.3 million) deal between RSA, EMC Corp’s security division, and the NSA regarding the use of a flawed algorithm in encryption products.

The RSA has issued a statement regarding the allegations, but many, including Hypponen, are unhappy with the fact that the company hasn’t specifically denied accepting the money from the NSA in order to set the agency’s encryption algorithm as a default option in the BSAFE encryption library.

“Aptly enough, the talk I won’t be delivering at RSA 2014 was titled ‘Governments as Malware Authors’,” reads Hypponen’s letter addressed to Joseph M. Tucci and Art Coviello, the chiefs of EMC and RSA.

“I don’t really expect your multibillion dollar company or your multimillion dollar conference to suffer as a result of your deals with the NSA,” the expert added.

“In fact, I'm not expecting other conference speakers to cancel. Most of your speakers are american anyway – why would they care about surveillance that’s not targeted at them but at non-americans. Surveillance operations from the US intelligence agencies are targeted at foreigners. However I’m a foreigner. And I’m withdrawing my support from your event.”

In addition to Hypponen, Josh Thomas, chief breaking officer at Atredis, has also announced pulling his talk “as a moral imperative.”

Mikko Hypponen’s and Josh Thomas’ names have already been removed from the RSA Conference USA 2014 speakers list. It remains to be seen if any of the other 407 speakers decide to follow their example.