biography: Brian SNOW
Security bibliography - Biographies
Full Name: Brian D. SNOW A picture of Brian Snow
Former job title: Technical Director of the Information Assurance Directorate of the United States National Security Agency (NSA).
Personal webpage: LinkedIn
Personal email: briansnow at comcast.net
Personal phone: +1-301-854-3255
Statement: Brian Snow, "Statement on Synaptic Labs." (2011)
Streaming Video: "Our Cyber Security Status is Grim (and the way ahead will be hard)", free streaming video, 23 minutes long, November 2011. 
Streaming Video: See more free videos by Brian Snow below.
Best known for:
Awards:

Brian Snow is now a “Distinguished Member of the Cryptomathematics Institute (CMI)” at the NSA (2011)
Biography:

Mathematician/computer scientist, Brian taught mathematics and helped lay the groundwork for a computer science department at Ohio University in the late 1960’s. He joined the National Security Agency in 1971 where he became a cryptologic designer and security systems architect.

Brian spent his first 20 years at NSA doing and directing research that developed cryptographic components and secure systems. Many cryptographic systems serving the U.S. government and military use his algorithms; they provide capabilities not previously available and span a range from nuclear command and control to tactical radios for the battlefield. Computer Security, Network Security and strong Assurance were major aspects for these systems. He created and managed NSA’s Secure Systems Design division in the 1980s. He has many patents, awards, and honors attesting to his creativity.

His later years at NSA were the model for what it means to be a senior Technical Director at NSA (similar to a Chief Scientist or Senior Technical Fellow in industry); he served in that capacity in three major mission components –

  • The Research Directorate (1994-1995),
  • The Information Assurance Directorate (1996-2002), and
  • The Directorate for Education and Training -- NSA’s Corporate University (2003-2006)

He was the first Technical Director appointed at the “Key Component” level at NSA, and the only “techie” at NSA to serve in such a role across three different Directorates. Throughout those years, his Credo was:

“Managers are responsible for doing things right;
Technical Directors are responsible for finding the right things to do.”

In all of his positions, he insisted that the actions NSA took to provide intelligence for our national and military leaders should not put U.S. persons or their rights at risk. He was a leading voice for always assessing the unintended consequences of both success and failure prior to taking action.

Brian retired in 2006 and is now a Security Consultant and Ethics Advisor.

B.A. mathematics 1965 -- University of Colorado
Quotes:

"He who gets to the interface first, wins."
Publication: Brian Snow, "Our Cyber Security Status is Grim (and the way ahead will be hard)", Malta Internationl Cyber Awareness Seminar, free streaming video, 23 minutes long, November 2011. 
Publication: Brian Snow, "The Importance of Implementation", World Science Festival 2011, (Courtesy of worldsciencefestival.com)
Publication: Brian Snow, "Cyber-Terrorism: A Question of Intent", World Science Festival 2011, (Courtesy of worldsciencefestival.com)
Publication: Brian Snow, Clinton Brooks, "Privacy and security: An ethics code for U.S. intelligence officers", August 2009
Publication: Steven J. Greenwald, Steven J. Greenwald, Brian D. Snow, Richard Thieme, Richard Ford, "Towards an Ethical Code for Information Security?", 2008
Publication: Brian Snow, "We Need Assurance!" (see our bibliography page for PDF, MP3)
Publication: Brian Snow, "It's not lovely code, it's an ugly monkey", AusCert 2008, (Courtesy of ZDNet.com.au)

See recommended Personal Software Process bib entry, Capability Maturity Module CMMI Level 5 (overview), ISO 9000 on Wikipedia.
Publication: Brian Snow, "How encryption can go bad", AusCert 2008, (Courtesy of ZDNet.com.au)
Last Updated on Monday, 12 March 2012 16:59
 

Synaptic Laboratories Website Executive Summary

One of President Barack Obama’s first acts on becoming President was to order a comprehensive review of cyber security in the USA.  When presenting the subsequent report, the President's public statement on the universal nature of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems and future requirements can be summarised as follows:

ICT is the critical enabler of our modern standard of living and way of life (used in virtually everything). Existing ICT systems do not offer the security and dependability that matches their essential nature.  Consequently, our entire modern way of life is at risk. It is essential that ICT systems evolve to offer similar levels of assurance as found today in coal mines and aerospace.

Since the Report was published, the essential requirements for future ICT systems have been studied and the hard open problems published in major Government initiatives in the USA, Europe and elsewhere.

Synaptic Laboratories Limited has been an active participant in several of these major initiatives, including participation at the ‘by invitation only’ USA National Cyber Security Summit (NITRD NCLY) that followed the USA President’s cyber review.  Synaptic Labs designs universal ICT platforms and models that resolve many of the critical hard open security problems that exist across today's ICT systems, including in computing platforms, identity management, and much more.

To provide one example, Synaptic Labs (public and private) cloud computing model (TruSIP) offers advanced security controls against covert storage / timing channel attacks, and a wide range of side-channel attacks mounted by both outsiders and privileged insiders.  Insiders explicitly include the cloud provider's technical and managerial staff, as well as all insiders involved in design, implementation and maintenance of the components used in that cloud deployment.  As of 2011, our proposal is over 10+ million times faster than our nearest competitor, IBM's Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE).  The U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency will invest USD 20 million research over 5 years with the goal of reducing the performance of FHE from 10+ million times slower down to 100 thousand times slower than unencrypted computation.  By way of comparison, TruSIP's commercially relevant performance is estimated at only 2.5x - 3.5x slower than unencrypted computation.

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