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Gallery

The top ten security heroes

Posted on 3 Dec 2009 at 14:35

He also coined the term “computer virus” in 1984. Thankfully, Cohen went on to pioneer virus defence, and his 1988 paper “On the implications of Computer Viruses and Methods of Defense” was integral to the work of many of those involved in the nascent antivirus industry of the 1990s.

3. Dr Taher Elgamal

“Imagine an online world where credit card transactions were unencrypted,” we said just a moment ago – well, if it wasn’t for the work of Dr Taher Elgamal there would be no need. The good doctor, an Egyptian American cryptographer, is pretty much single-handedly to thank for the internet e-commerce revolution.

Why? As the former chief scientist at Netscape Communications, Elgamal was the influence behind the delivery of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) that allowed, for the first time, end-to-end internet data security. SSL combined public-key and symmetric-key exchanges between client and server to encrypt sensitive data before transmission, thus enabling secure transactions.

During his three years at Netscape, the doctor pioneered the cryptographic protocols that continue to enable secure online commerce today. It was his Netscape team that developed and designed SSL, which applied for the patents and ultimately donated it to the online community at large because, as Dr Elgamal once told us, he “saw the great benefit of making it available to everyone”.

And everyone soon took advantage, including Netscape’s chief rival Microsoft, which sealed the deal as far as SSL becoming an internet security standard was concerned. From credit card transactions through to building VPNs, Dr Elgamal’s invention has literally been the business.

4. William R Cheswick & Steven M Bellovin

Just as there is controversy over who invented antivirus software, so there is when it comes to the packet filtering firewall – with knobs on.

Perhaps the most vocal of the would-be inventors is Nir Zuk, the brains behind the firewall enabled with stateful inspection technology, launched by Check Point back in 1994. Zuk claims it was the first firewall that actually worked.

It’s a big claim, and to be fair Zuk does have a point, as stateful inspection is now de rigeur.

Others have had claims hoist upon them, such as Marcus Ranum, who’s often described as the “father of the firewall” for his work developing the DEC “Secure external Access Link” firewall in 1990; but he himself describes the label as nothing but marketing BS.

Our money goes on Cheswick and Bellovin, who were certainly the first people to come up with the notion of using packet-filtering techniques to refuse passage to anything that wasn’t specifically allowed.

The reason Cheswick and Bellovin don’t get much firewall pioneering kudos is that they were working for AT&T Bell Labs in the late 1980s, which wanted to keep much of their research secret.

Ranum, on the other hand, saw his DEC SEAL shipped in 1992, and so wins the prize for the first commercial firewall product. One thing is for sure, the internet without a firewall would be a very dangerous place.

5. Dan Kaminsky

Kaminsky is that rare beast a modern-day security hero who, it could genuinely be said, saved the internet. Saved the internet from what, you might ask? The answer: from itself.

A Director of Penetration Testing for a security company, Kaminsky stumbled upon a rather serious vulnerability in the Domain Name System (DNS) upon which the internet relies. DNS basically translates the domain names you understand (www.pcpro.co.uk) into the IP addresses (212.100.242.151) that machines recognise. It is, in other words, at the very heart of the internet.