MARK CURPHEY
COMMUNITY - THE KILLER APP

About Mark Curphey, OWASP AppSec USA 2011 September 22 morning keynote and OWASP founder

As OWASP celebrated ten years, OWASP AppSec USA 2011's September 22 morning keynote, OWASP founder Mark Curphey, made his return and ran with the theme of Community - The Killer App, much in the spirit of recent SXSW keynote Christopher Poole.

Mark joined OWASP AppSec USA 2011's other morning keynote, world class speaker and author Ira Winkler, author of Spies Among Us, and lunch keynote and secure protocol expert Moxie Marlinspike.

The following information was current as of OWASP AppSec USA 2011.

Mark Curphey graduated from Royal Holloway, University of London with a Masters degree in Information Security in the mid-nineties (as a mature student). Royal Holloway is recently famous as the cryptography school where the cryptographer Sophie Neveu was educated in the bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code.

After spending several years working at investment banks in the City of London working on a variety of technical projects including PKI design, Windows NT security, policy development and single sign-on systems, he moved to Atlanta to run a consulting team performing security assessments at Internet Security Systems (now a division of IBM).

In late 2000 Mark Curphey took a job at Charles Schwab to create and manage the global software security program where he was responsible for ensuring the security of all business applications protecting over a Trillion dollars of customer investments. During this period Mark started OWASP (http://www.owasp.org), the Open Web Application Security Project. In 2003 he then joined a small startup called Foundstone to take the experience learnt at Schwab to other Fortune 1000 companies. Foundstone was sold to McAfee in October 2004 and Mark Curphey joined the McAfee executive team reporting directly to the President.

Mark Curphey was awarded the Microsoft MVP for Visual Developer Security in 2005 for his community work in advancing the discipline of software security. In November 2006 he left Foundstone, moved back to Europe and took a year out to think seriously about the design of an information security management platform. A year later he joined Microsoft as a product Unit Manager building static analysis tools and protection libraries for web applications.

Mark Curphey currently runs the MSDN Subscriptions engineering team at Microsoft and is working on a side project with friends developing better social networking software for online communities using Ruby on Rails.

Mark Curphey now lives in Seattle with his wife and three children and in recent times has discovered distance running (bare foot) with aspirations for ultra-marathon trail running in the future.