Daniel Spisak on Technology

I’m in San Francisco, CA at the 2008 RSA security conference this week and have been getting my bearings around here. This is the first time I’ve ever been to Moscone Center or the Metreon and so far its all pretty snazzy. Beautiful view of the city skyline from the 4th floor of the Metreon can be found on my Flickr account.

In any event, when you pickup your registration info and show badge you’re handed three things. A show planner, the addendums to the show program, and how to connect to the RSA WiFi network. The howto document for connecting to the wifi is larger then the show program addendum! So while in the press room I attempted to get online with RSA wifi network and discovered that I might as well have been trying to negotiate with the Packet Nazi (motto, “No packets for you!”). So why is this so damned hard? Lets outline the problems here:

1. Your RSA website name is different from your RSA WiFi name
2. Your RSA website password is NOT your RSA WiFi password
3. You must be running an OS that speaks WPA and PEAP. Support WEP only? Tough titties for you.
4. To get your RSA wifi password, you have to login with a RSA website password not given to you. So you must request it be sent to your email.
5. Your RSA website login is NOT your email address (seriously, wtf were you thinking guys?

So basically, you have to login to the RSA website with something other then your email address, with a password that is auto-generated for you. Except you dont remember the username you specified, so you have to get THAT emailed to you as well. Then, once you login to the RSA website you can get your WiFi password.

Armed with that password, you then use PEAP and 802.1x to login to the WiFi, EXCEPT your username here is now your email address you used to register your RSA badge with! Basically, I watched a few people in the press room struggle with this, myself included. And in one case, a person had a laptop that only supported WEP and they had to revert to a wired connection. Incidentally, the WiFi instructions document covered only Windows systems and only briefly mentions OS X in it anywhere and doesn’t give instructions for OS X. Where is my FAILboat?

Did I forget to mention that most of these steps you cant do unless you are connected to a network of some kind? Catch-22 galore, yay!

Moral of this story? RSA needs single-signon badly! I mean, why on earth do I need a separate username and password for the RSA website different from my RSA wifi credentials?