Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? worries the classical Roman maxim: “Who watches the watchmen?” But in point of fact, the security vendors who stand guard over today’s networked information systems are under considerable scrutiny from their competitors, their customers, hackers and, increasingly often, governments concerned about national security. Scientific American’s editor in chief John Rennie sat down in Palo Alto, Calif., this past May with representatives from the security industry—and from some of the industries that will rely on the protections they provide—to discuss the challenges they will confront. What follows is an edited transcript of some highlights of those Proceedings. —The Editors

The Participants
Rahul Abhyankar: Senior director of product management, McAfee Avert Labs, McAfee
Whitfield Diffie: Vice President and Fellow, chief security officer, Sun Microsystems
Art Gilliland: Vice president of product management, information risk and compliance, Symantec
Patrick Heim: Chief information security officer, Kaiser Permanente
John Landwehr: Director, security solutions and strategy, Adobe Systems
Steven B. Lipner: Senior director of security engineering strategy, Microsoft
Martin Sadler: Director, systems security lab, HP Labs, Hewlett-Packard
Ryan Sherstobitoff: Chief corporate evangelist, Panda Security US, Panda Security