Les Assises de la cybersécuritéTalk15 October 2021
From our fragilities, a strength
33 min
Plenary talk delivered to the cybersecurity industry gathered in Monaco. A rabbi facing a room of threat experts: what the heroes of the Bible, all chosen with their flaws, have to say about risk, connection and security, and why real resilience is never a return to the way things were. Conducted in French.
“Moses is at the top of the mountain, at the top of Mount Sinai, to receive the Tablets of the Law, and above his head there is, and it is written in the Bible, a cloud in which God reveals himself. And there, of course, you understand: Moses is the first person ever to download data from the cloud onto a tablet.”
“You think the cybersecurity world is rather male, that parity is a struggle? Well, how shall I put it: compared to the world of religion, you are amateurs.”
“Our professions are, for you as for me, religious professions in the etymological sense, centred on the Latin religare, what binds, literally: the strength of the link. That is what a religion means: the commitment to create bonds, to create connection between beings, between times, between generations.”
“Let me sum up the situation: in the Bible, the heroes we imagine embodying solidity and the promise of security are, respectively, at the start of Genesis, a sterile patriarch, a blind visionary and an upright man who limps.”
The session
The talk opens in self-mockery: a rabbi's inbox, full of messages that begin exactly like classic scams, makes her "an excellent client" for every hacker on earth. Then the half-serious demonstration that cybersecurity was born in the Bible: Moses on Sinai under the cloud, Hebrew as a coded language that millennia of exegesis have not fully decrypted. Next, what the two worlds share: parity struggles, religare as the profession of the link, and fundamentalism as the hacking of sacred texts. Then the journey through the text: sterile Abraham, Isaac the blind visionary, Jacob the upright man who limps, Jesus and Muhammad in their wounds, and Moses the stutterer, a spokesman chosen with a fault in the encoding of the message. The final part dismantles the misunderstanding of resilience (the cracks cannot be resealed, we live with what is broken) and closes on virology: ten to fifteen percent of our genome is viral in origin, and Jewish humour as a pillar for staying upright. It ends with a joke about the crossed number seven and the Ten Commandments.