The Top 10 Most Influential Security Visionaries Of All Time

AT&T Chief Security Officer Ed Amoroso, speaking before a packed auditorium Thursday at his company's cyber security conference,
wanted to test the collective knowledge of those in the room. How well
studied were they in the visionaries who've had the greatest impact on
IT security? Not very well, it turns out, as few could put names to the
faces projected as part of Amoroso's slide show. Amoroso was giving
props to the giants on whose shoulders today's security pros stand.

They're
not all computer scientists, but they've done important work that has
influenced IT security. Security pros who know and cite some or all of
the following people in their conversations with Amoroso show they have
a real commitment to the discipline of security, he says.

Here they are, in the order Amoroso presented:

1) Edsger Dijkstra -- The
late professor emeritus of Computer Sciences and Mathematics at The
University of Texas at Austin believed that simplicity and clarity are
the two attributes of any computing system that mean the difference
between success and failure, Amoroso said. Nowhere is this truer than
in security.

2) Peter Neumann -- Neumann,
who spent a decade at the Computer Science Lab at Bell Labs in Murray
Hill, N.J., devoted much of his career to researching security, crypto
applications, overall system survivability, reliability, fault
tolerance, and risk avoidance.

3) Dorothy Denning -- Denning
was the Patricia and Patrick Callahan Family Professor of Computer
Science and director of the Georgetown Institute for Information
Assurance. She left Georgetown to become a professor in the Department
of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, where she
addresses cyber crime and cyber terrorism, information warfare and
security, and cryptography.

4) Clifford Stoll -- "I spend almost as much time figuring out what's wrong with my computer as I do actually using it," the highly quo