Leading experts in the security industry gathered in the cryptography panel during the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco. On Tuesday, they talked about various issues regarding cyber security; however, with its rising popularity cloud computing was the dominant topic in everybody’s questions.

Whitfield Diffie, chief security officer at Sun Microsystems, believes that the future with cloud computing means programs will no longer need to be done on the computers that a company uses to access it. Ronald Rivest, computer science professor working at MIT, on the other hand expects cloud computing systems will be an integral part of future applications and developments in cyber security. However, he believes that providing security to cloud computing systems will be difficult, but is still optimistic in its future.

Not all share his optimism though. Adi Shamir, a professor in computer science at Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, is worried about cloud computing. He believes that the shared computing done on different machines across the Internet can cause viruses infecting a single computer on the network to quickly spread and be harder to diagnose and fix. BT Counterpane chief security technology officer Bruce Schneier is not impressed with cloud computing. He believes that while cloud computing is being marketed as a revolutionary paradigm for online computing, he believes that it is not really very different from existing technologies such as client-server models and dumb terminals. He believes it is still a matter of trusting cloud computing to be secure.

 When asked about the possibility of a “Digital Pearl Harbor” occurring, referring to the Japanese attack on Hawaii in World War II, the experts agreed it was not as likely as it has been feared.

 Schneier believes that the damage done in an attack on cloud computing networks will not be so different from current cyber security threats such as viruses and other malware, and that damage in the scale of Pearl Harbor is not very likely. He describes the damage done will be “boring” and the type “that cost people money”. However, Diffie does not dismiss the threat of a major, unexpected threat which may occur in the future, something which he describes as closer to a “Digital 9/11”. He believes that the threat is not from known entities such as government but rather something unknown which may cause far-reaching damage. Shamir believes, on the other hand, that the government should put it efforts in cyber security with respect to other pressing matters in the country, such as the economic crisis.