F. Lynn McNulty, an early champion of information security in the government, passed away on June 4. McNulty, whom Federal Computer Week identified as one of the key thought leaders of the past 25 years in a feature package that will appear in the June 15 issue, spent 30 years in the government.

Over the span of his federal career he served as the State Department’s first director of information systems security; as security program manager at the Federal Aviation Administration; and as associate director for computer security at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Hellman is best known for his invention, with Diffie and Merkle, of public key cryptography. In addition to many other uses, this technology forms the basis for secure transactions on the Internet. He has also been a long-time contributor to the computer privacy debate, starting with the issue of DES key size in 1975 and culminating with service (1994-96) on the National Research Council's Committee to Study National Cryptographic Policy, whose main recommendations have since been implemented.

His current project in this area, Defusing the Nuclear Threat, has been endorsed by a number of prominent individuals including a former Director of the National Security Agency, Stanford's President Emeritus, and two Nobel Laureates.

Merkle developed the world's earliest public key cryptographic system. Their insight underpins secure transactions on the Internet, enabling e-commerce and a host of other interactions in which secure electronic communications are required.

Since 1988, Merkle has been researching nanotechnology and, in 2003, became a distinguished professor at Georgia Tech before returning to California in 2006.He has been awarded the RSA Award in Mathematics (2000) and the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal (2010).

Diffie and Hellman worked together throughout 1975 and were joined by Ralph Merkle in 1976. The results of their work appeared in Diffie and Hellman's paper, New Directions in Cryptography, in November 1976. The insights in this paper underpin secure transactions on the Internet, enabling e-commerce and a host of other interactions in which secure electronic communications are required.

In 1992, Diffie was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and in 2010, shared the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal with Ralph Merkle and Martin Hellman.

She is currently a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate Schoolin Monterey, CA, and is one of the faculty associated with the Center on Terrorism and Irregular Warfare and with the Center for Information Systems Security Studies and Research.

Dr. Denning has published 150 articles and four books, her most recent being Information Warfare and Security. She has been named to the ISSA Hall of Fame (2003), awarded the CSO COMPASS award (2003), named as both a CISSP and as a CISM honoris causa, and elected as a Fellow of the ACM (1995).

Dr. Schell was co-founder and Vice President for Engineering of Gemini Computers, Inc., where he directed development of Gemini's Class A1 network processor commercial product. He was also the founding Deputy Director of the (now) National Computer Security Center. Previously he was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Naval Postgraduate School.

He has been referred to as the "father" of the Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria (the "Orange Book"). The NIST and NSA have recognized Dr. Schell with the National Computer System Security Award.

In the Computer Science Laboratory at SRI he led the Provably Secure Operating System (PSOS) project, under which the SRI Hierarchical Development Methodology (HDM) was created.

Dr. Neumann’s main research interests continue to involve security, crypto applications, overall system survivability, reliability, fault tolerance, safety, software-engineering methodology, systems in the large, applications of formal methods, and risk avoidance. He has written numerous papers, given many talks, and has provided testimony before government hearings. He recently published a book Computer Related Risks (ACM Press, 1995).

Dr. Landwehr is a noted expert in trustworthy computing, including high assurance software development, understanding software flaws and vulnerabilities, token-based authentication, system evaluation and certification methods, multilevel security, and architectures for intrusion tolerant systems

He has been a leader in cybersecurity research, having led cybersecurity programs at the National Science Foundation from 2001-2004 and 2009-2011, overseeing the disbursement of more than $110M of grants, and having served as a division chief at IARPA from 2005-2009. He is now the Lead Research Scientist in the Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute (CSPRI) at George Washington University.

He is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Computer Science at MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)

Rivest is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the International Association for Cryptologic Research, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

. He is a co-inventor of the RSA algorithm (with Ron Rivest and Len Adleman), a co-inventor of the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme (with Uriel Feige and Amos Fiat), one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis and has made numerous contributions to the fields of cryptography and computer science

In addition to RSA, Shamir's other numerous inventions and contributions to cryptography include the Shamir secret sharing scheme, the breaking of the Merkle-Hellman knapsack cryptosystem, visual cryptography, and the TWIRL and TWINKLE factoring devices.

Shamir has also made contributions to computer science outside of cryptography, such as finding the first linear time algorithm for 2-satisfiability and showing the equivalence of the complexity classes PSPACE and IP.

He is known for being a co-inventor of the RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) cryptosystem in 1977, and of DNA computing. RSA is in widespread use in security applications, including https.

For his contribution to the invention of the RSA cryptosystem, Adleman, along with Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir, has been a recipient of the 1996 Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award and the 2002 ACM Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of Computer Science.

He is one of the original discoverers of the Adleman-Pomerance-Rumely primality test. Fred Cohen, in his 1984 paper, Experiments with Computer Viruses has credited Adleman with coining the term "virus".

Richard Alan Clarke was a U.S. government employee for 30 years, 1973–2003. He worked for the State Department during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

In 1992, President George H.W. Bush appointed him to chair the Counter-terrorism Security Group and to a seat on the United States National Security Council.

Mr. Grimes was sworn in as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration (ASD NII) / Department of Defense Chief Information Officer (CIO) on November 14, 2005 and served in this capacity until 30 April 2009.

Karl Gumtow is Chief Executive Officer and founder of CyberPoint International, a cyber security company delivering innovative, leading-edge products, solutions, and services to customers worldwide.

One of CyberPoint’s missions is identifying promising global technologies and bringing them to the US market.

He has worked for more than two decades at all levels of the commercial and US Government security communities.

Mr. Jacobs was the first Information Assurance (IA) Director at the National Security Agency (NSA). Under his leadership, NSA began implementing an Information Assurance strategy to protect the Defense Information Infrastructure and as appropriate, the National Information Infrastructure.

He served as the Deputy Associate Director for Operations, Military Support where he was responsible for developing a single and coherent military support strategy for NSA.

Susan Landau is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Computer Science at Harvard University, where she works on cyber security policy issues. Landau was previously a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems.

Prior to that, she taught at the University of Massachusetts and Wesleyan University and conducted research in algebraic algorithms. Landau is the author of Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies (MIT Press, 2011), and co-author, with Whitfield Diffie, Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption (MIT Press, 1998, rev. ed. 2007).

For more than fifteen years Francis Landolf led public sector organizations responsible for delivering time critical services essential for informed military and National level decisions.

Mr. Landolf began his public service career at the National Security Agency in 1975 while working on a PhD in Mathematics at the University of Kentucky.

He was awarded the Exceptional Civilian Service Award by the National Security Agency in 2005 and received the Meritorious Executive Presidential Rank Award in 2004.

Mr. Lentz is the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber, Identity and Information Assurance (CIIA) in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Networks and Information Integration/Chief Information Officer.

Since November 2000, he served as the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for the Department of Defense (DoD) and in this capacity, oversaw the departments 3 Billion dollar Information Assurance & Cyber Security programs.

He established the first comprehensive IA/Cyber Architecture and played a key role in leading the United States National Cyber Initiative.

Dr. Douglas Maughan is a Branch Chief in Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA) within the Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Doug is directing the Cyber Security Research and Development activities at HSARPA. Prior to his appointment at DHS, Doug was a Program Manager in the Advanced Technology Office (ATO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Virginia.

His research interests and related programs were in the areas of networking and information assurance.

Prior to his appointment at DARPA, Doug worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) as a senior computer scientist and led several research teams performing network security research. Doug received bachelors degrees in Computer Science and Applied Statistics from Utah State University, a master's degree in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).

William D. Newhouse is a cyber security advisor in the Computer Security Division, part of the Information Technology Lab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Mr. Newhouse’s primary role is representing NIST in several collaborative efforts.

Mr. Newhouse is part of the team at NIST leading the National Initiative for Cyber security Education (NICE). He represents NIST in a partnership with DHS and the financial sector to develop and test innovative cyber security technologies and processes.

Robert D. Rodriguez is the Chairman and Founder of the Security Innovation Network (SINET) www.security-innovation.org whose focus is on the advancement of IT security innovation into the industry and government markets.

Previous to this he spent over twenty-two years as a Special Agent with the United States Secret Service. During this tenure he held a number of leadership roles within Executive Protection, Protective Intelligence and Criminal Investigations. He served as a supervisor on the Presidential Protective Detail, Counter Assault Team, Protective Intelligence and Criminal Investigation operations.

Mr. Schaeffer has over 40 years total U.S. Government service, including 15 years as a member of the Defense Intelligence Senior Executive Service.

He brings extensive leadership, management and technical experience in the area of Information Security and Intelligence.

During the early phase of his career Mr. Schaeffer led technical programs and organizations from several dozen to several hundred people, with financial responsibility from several million to almost a billion dollars.

Dr. Schou is the director of the National Information Assurance Training and Education Center (NIATEC) and the Simplot Decision Support Center (SDSC). These are two key components of the Informatics Research Institute.

In 1996, the Simplot Decision Support Center center was cited by the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) for Outstanding Contributions to the Profession.

Gene Spafford is a professor of computer science at Purdue University and a leading computer security expert.

A historically significant Internet figure, he is renowned for first analyzing the Morris Worm, one of the earliest  computer worms, and his prominent role in the Usenet backbone cabal. Spafford was a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee 2003-2005, has been an advisor to the National Science Foundation (NSF), and serves as an advisor to over a dozen other government agencies and major corporations.

Steve Walker is President of Steve Walker & Associates and Managing Partner of Walker Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund specializing in the Mid Atlantic region.

Steve had a 22-year career with the Department of Defense at the National Security Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Steve was a member of a team that developed the ARPAnet, the breakthrough packet switching system that evolved into the Internet.