John Viega (born February 22, 1974) is an American computer security author, researcher and professional.

Early life

He earned his BA from the University of Virginia. As an undergraduate, he worked in Randy Pausch's Stage 3 Research Group, as an early contributor to Alice. Viega earned an MS in Computer Science, also from the University of Virginia.

Career

John Viega co-authored the widely used

GCM mode In cryptography, Galois/Counter Mode (GCM) is a mode of operation for symmetric-key cryptographic block ciphers which is widely adopted for its performance. GCM throughput rates for state-of-the-art, high-speed communication channels can be achiev ...

of operation for AES, along with David A. McGrew. He also co-designed its predecessor,

CWC mode In cryptography, CWC Mode (Carter–Wegman + CTR mode) is an AEAD block cipher mode of operation that provides both encryption and built-in message integrity, similar to CCM and OCB modes. It combines the use of CTR mode for encryption with an ...

John Viega was also a pioneer in static analysis for security vulnerabilities. He was responsible for the first publicly available tool, ITS4., as well as the prominent open source Rough Auditing Tool for Security (RATS). He also founded Secure Software, the first commercial vendor for such tools, which was bought by

Fortify Software Fortify Software, later known as Fortify Inc., is a California-based software security vendor, founded in 2003 and acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2010, Micro Focus in 2017, and OpenText in 2022. Fortify offerings included Static application secu ...

. John Viega was also the original author of

OWASP The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is an online community that produces freely-available articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies in the field of web application security. The OWASP provides free and open ...

's CLASP, a lightweight process for relating software development to security. He is also a former editor-in-chief for the IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine. In addition, Viega is the original author of the

GNU Mailman GNU () is an extensive collection of free software (383 packages as of January 2022), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operat ...

mailing list program. John Viega is Executive Vice President, Products and Engineering at BAE Systems Applied Intelligence. He joined BAE Systems through the 2014 acquisition of SilverSky, a cloud security provider funded by Goldman Sachs and Bessemer Ventures. Prior to SilverSky, Viega was at McAfee, where he was CTO for SaaS, and prior to that, McAfee's Chief Security Architect. He currently teaches at NYU, and has previously taught at Virginia Tech. In 2016, he founded Capsule8, which was acquired by Sophos in July, 2021. He is the co-author of Building Secure Software (Addison Wesley, 2001), which was the first book to teach developers how to write secure software. He has since co-authored a number of additional books on computer security, including The Myths of Security (O'Reilly, 2009), Beautiful Security, (O'Reilly, 2009) Network Security with OpenSSL (O’Reilly, 2002), the Secure Programming Cookbook (O’Reilly, 2003) and the 19 Deadly Sins of Software Security (McGraw Hill, 2005).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Viega, John 1974 births Living people MUD developers People associated with computer security American technology writers University of Virginia alumni