Can Source Boston save us from boring security conferences?

Most security conferences–aside from perhaps Black Hat and Defcon–are pretty much interchangeable. Various industry executives/researchers/consultants get up and talk about the hot issues of the day with varying degrees of technical depth and charisma. You sit and listen and at the end of the day, you’re sort of unsure what just happened and whether you actually learned anything.

But there’s a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel from a new conference called Source Boston that’s set for this week. The speaker lineup looks really solid and the topics are not your average big picture drivel. They’re getting down into the weeds to find some things that haven’t been covered a thousand times before. There are a few talks that I think should be really intriguing, starting with one by Dave Dittrich and Bruce Dang on the Nugache P2P malware outbreak. I’ve seen Dittrich give a version of this talk before and it’s fascinating. Also, Sinan Eren of Immunity Security is going to talk about application security and there’s a separate panel on application security that includes Jeremiah Grossman and Robert Hansen. Not bad.

But the big draw has to be the reunion of several original members of the L0pht for a panel discussion on Friday afternoon. It’s going to be the first time a lot of these guys, including Chris Wysopal, Mudge, Christien Rioux, Space Rogue, John Tan and others, have been in the same room together in a long time. If nothing else, it will be entertaining. And that’s a big step in the right direction.