Former White House cybersecurity advisor Richard Clarke is to present one of the seven keynote speeches at the event, to be held at the Hilton London Metropole from 12–14 October.
Clarke, currently chairman of Good Harbor Consulting, is an internationally recognised expert on security, including cybersecurity and cyber war, said Linda Lynch, RSA Europe conference manager.
Former US Department of Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff was a late addition to the line-up of keynote speakers.
Chertoff, will focus on security and ensuring freedom in the uncertain world of cyberspace, said Lynch.
Cloud computing will remain a dominant topic, but discussions this year will move from the theoretical to the operational, said Hugh Thompson, information security expert and RSA Conference programme committee chair.
"Last year we were talking about risks, possibilities and potential deployments, but this year sessions will be more finely grained and focus on real operational aspects of cloud, which shows maturity around cloud security," he said.
Privacy is a hot topic in Europe, said Thompson, and several sessions will be looking at issues such as how organisations deal with sometimes conflicting legislation.
Attitudes around privacy are changing, and Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer at BT, is to present a keynote on security, privacy and the generation gap.
Another big theme is consumerisation, which although it was touched on in 2009, it too has become operationalised and sessions will look at what companies have found, obstacles they have encountered, and provide practical guidelines, said Thompson.
Several sessions will focus on social networking, the implications of searchable public information, and personalised attacks.
A highlight will be a panel discussion that examines online scams and social engineering attacks and why smart people continue to be taken in by them.
New this year will be the Pecha Kucha event at which well-known security industry representatives will have just 6.5 minutes to talk to 20 presentation slides, which is one every 20 seconds.
The Japanese-inspired high-energy presentation method of delivering a lot of information in a short period of time was first used at RSA Conference US 2010 in April, said Lynch.
This story was first published by Computer Weekly