Dr. Burt Kaliski Jr., Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, leads Verisign’s long-term research program. Through the program’s innovation initiatives, the CTO organization, in collaboration with business and technology leaders across the company, explores emerging technologies, assesses their impact on the company’s business, prototypes and evaluates new concepts, and recommends new strategies and solutions. Burt is also responsible for the company’s industry standards engagements, university collaborations, and technical community programs.
Prior to joining Verisign in 2011, Burt served as the Founding Director of the EMC Innovation Network, the global collaboration among EMC’s research and advanced technology groups and its university partners. He joined EMC from RSA Security, where he served as Vice President of Research and Chief Scientist. Burt started his career at RSA in 1989, where, as the founding scientist of RSA Laboratories, his contributions included the development of the Public-Key Cryptography Standards, now widely deployed in internet security.
Burt has held appointments as a guest professor at Wuhan University’s College of Computer Science and as a guest professor and member of the international advisory board of Peking University's School of Software and Microelectronics. He has also taught at Stanford University and Rochester Institute of Technology. Burt was Program Co-chair of Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems 2002, Chair of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers P1363 working group, Program Chair of CRYPTO ’97, and General Chair of CRYPTO ’91. He has also served on the scientific advisory board of QEDIT, a privacy-enhancing technology provider.
Burt is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, a senior member of the IEEE Computer Society, and a member of Tau Beta Pi.
Burt received his PhD, Master of Science and Bachelor of Science degrees in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his research focused on cryptography.
Verisign posted preliminary public comments on the “Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions” Phase One Report released by ICANN earlier this month. JAS Global Advisors, authors of the report contracted by ICANN, have done solid work putting together a set of recommendations to address the name collisions problem, which is not an easy one, given the uncertainty for how installed systems actually interact with the global DNS. However, there is still much work to be done.
Presentations, papers and video recordings from the name collisions workshop held earlier this month in London are now available at the workshop web site, namecollisions.net.
The goal for the workshop, described in my “colloquium on collisions” post, was that researchers and practitioners would “speak together” to keep name spaces from “striking together.” The program committee put together an excellent set of talks toward this purpose, providing a strong, objective technical foundation for dialogue. I’m grateful to the committee, speakers, attendees and organizers for their contributions to a successful two-day event, which I am hopeful will have benefit toward the security and stability of internet naming for many days to come.
With that technique, domain names that are currently on one of ICANN’s second-level domain (SLD) block lists can be registered and delegated for regular use, provided that they first go through a trial period where they’re mapped to a designated “test” address. The staged introduction of new SLDs is intended to provide operators of installed systems the opportunity to assess the potential impact of an impending name collision on their own, before any external operators have an opportunity to exploit it.
There may still be a few security practitioners working in the field who didn’t have a copy of Bruce Schneier’sApplied Cryptography on their bookshelf the day they started their careers. Bruce’s practical guide to cryptographic algorithms, key management techniques and security protocols, first published in 1993, was a landmark volume for the newly emerging field, and has been a reference to developers ever since.
Beyond just the popularity of the book, Bruce has also been widely recognized over the past two decades for his insightful commentary on the security issues of the day, featured on his monthly Crypto-Gram newsletter, his blog, “Schneier on Security,” 11 more books including the newly published Carry On, as well as numerous essays, op-eds and interviews.
It’s a genuine privilege therefore that Bruce will be keynoting the upcoming Name Collisions Workshop, to be held on March 8-10, in London.
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the verb collide is derived from the Latin verb collidere, which means, literally, “to strike together”: com- “together” + lædere “to strike, injure by striking.”
Combined instead with loquium, or “speaking,” the com- prefix produces the Latin-derived noun colloquy: “a speaking together.”
Researchers and practitioners know well the benefits of the colloquium, the technical conference, a gathering of those speaking together on a topic.
So consider WPNC 14 – the upcoming namecollisions.net workshop – a colloquium on collisions: speaking together to keep name spaces from striking together.
At each of our Verisign Labs’ Distinguished Speaker Series events I learn something new that stays with me and helps shape my thinking about technology and its impact on the world. The most recent brought the benefit of three insights, as the expanded event, Advancing Internet Technologies in the Developing World, featured a keynote speaker as well as two recipients of Verisign’s Infrastructure Grants.
Many years ago on my first trip to London, I encountered for the first time signs that warned pedestrians that vehicles might be approaching in a different direction than they were accustomed to in their home countries, given the left-versus-right-side driving patterns around the world. (I wrote a while back about one notable change from left-to-right, the Swedish “H Day,” as a comment on the IPv6 transition.)
If you’re not sure on which side to expect the vehicles, it’s better to look both ways — and look again — if you want to reduce the risk of a collision.
It’s a privilege for Verisign to welcome this week the recipients of our 2012 Internet Infrastructure Grant program, who will be presenting the results of research their teams have conducted over the past year and a half. The results will be the focus of our fourth and final Verisign Labs Distinguished Speaker Series event for the year.
The event will open with a keynote talk by Prof. Ellen Zegura of Georgia Tech (United States), who will give an overview of the field these two projects explore, “Intermittent and Low-Resource Networks: Theory and Practice.” It’s an honor to have Prof. Zegura with us to describe both the academic and hands-on work she’s conducted in this important area.
