Mozilla Security Expert To Speak at Seminar

Friday, January 27, 2017

Richard Barnes

Richard Barnes

Richard Barnes, security leader for Mozilla's Firefox free and open-source web browser, will be the featured speaker at a computer security seminar Monday, Jan. 30, at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

The event, free and open to the public, has been organized by Rose-Hulman's Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering. It is scheduled from 4:20 p.m. to 5:10 p.m. in Moench Hall's GM Room on campus.

The topic of Barnes' presentation is "Don't Ship Malware: Building and Delivering a Trustworthy Browser." He will discuss how Mozilla develops, builds and distributes the Firefox browser, the risks arising from the web product development process, and some approaches to addressing those risks.

Open source software has offered the promise of increased security through increased scrutiny of code and transparency about how software works. However, given the ways that software is constructed and deployed in practice, it can be difficult to achieve these properties with a high degree of assurance.

Barnes is author of web security and privacy standards and a member of the Internet Society's board of trustees. He served on the Internet Engineering Steering Group. He also was a co-founder of Let's Encrypt, author of the Automated Certificate Management Environment protocol, and author of 10 papers for the Internet Engineering Task Force.

For Mozilla, Barnes is responsible for ensuring that Firefox protects the security and privacy of its users, and he's working with partners across the industry to make the Internet more secure and trustworthy.

Before joining Mozilla, Barnes was a principal investigator with BBN Technologies, doing research to improve the security of the fundamental technologies that drive the Internet.