Press Release
Securitas Technologies, Inc. Adds Leading Information Security Experts to its Technical Advisory Board
Madison, WI: February 8, 2007
Securitas Technologies, Inc. announced today that it has appointed Dr. John Mitchell and Dr. Dan Boneh, both faculty of Computer Science at Stanford University, to its Technical Advisory Board.
“We are pleased to have the guidance and close working relationship with such renowned researchers and active contributors to the field of information security”, said Praveen Sinha, President and CEO of Securitas.
Dr. John Mitchell, Mary and Gordon Crary family professor of Computer Science at Stanford, is the director of the Stanford Computer Forum, an industrial affiliates program with extensive participation by major software companies in Silicon Valley. His research interests include Access Control and Privacy Policy, Authentication and Identity Theft, and Network Security Analysis. Dr. Mitchell has coauthored over 100 journal articles and 3 books in his field resulting in his being the 31st most cited author in computer science (according to CiteSeer). He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T)
Dr. Mitchell is also a co-Principal Investigator of the Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST), a multi-institutional center that aims to protect the nation’s computer infrastructure from cyberattacks while improving its reliability.
Dr. Boneh has specialized in the areas of information security and cryptography and is the editor of the Journal of Cryptography. The author of over 80 technical publications, Dr. Boneh holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and has received numerous awards, including the Packard Fellowship, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and the Terman Award. In 2005, Dr. Boneh was awarded the prestigious RSA Conference Award for Mathematics for his contributions to advances in cryptography.
In addition to his academic accomplishments, Dr. Boneh is also a co-founder and board member of Voltage Security (www.voltagesecurity.com), a global leader in enterprise privacy management. Since its formation in 2002, Voltage Security has grown its customer base to include over 250 organizations across the United States, Asia, and Europe. “Securitas will benefit not only from Dr Boneh’s technical knowledge and academic standing but also from his valuable experience as a successful entrepreneur in the information security industry”, added Sinha.
Drs. Mitchell and Boneh are co-directors of Stanford University Computer Security Laboratory. Among their joint projects is the Stanford anti-phishing project, (http://crypto.stanford.edu/antiphishing/), an ambitious suite of publicly-available programs that combat phishing and password theft attacks. In 2006, Password Hash, a technology developed by their group to help stop password theft, won Computer World’s Horizon Award.
“We see a lot of synergy between the technology being developed by Dr. Mitchell and Dr Boneh in the areas of anti-phishing and our work in policy-based behavior detection for anti-spyware and anti-virus.”, said Roger Chylla, Ph.D., CTO of Securitas.
Addition of Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Boneh to the technical advisor board of Securitas complements the existing presence of security company entrepreneurs that include Mr. Sanjay Sawhney, co-founder of two security companies, NeoScale (www.neoscale.com) and Ukiah Software (acquired by Novell).
Securitas Technologies, Inc. (www.securitastech.com) was formed in 2006 by Praveen Sinha and Dr. Somesh Jha, a faculty in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Securitas Technologies has secured exclusive licensing rights on three patent-pending technologies, related to behavior-based and automated detection of malware, from Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF). The company is planning a product launch in the latter half of this year.