Derek Atkins

Mr. Atkins, Chief Technology Officer, specializes in architecting, designing, developing, and deploying network and systems security applications. He was formerly a senior member of the technical staff at Mocana Corporation, Senior Principal Software Engineer at Symantec (formally PGP Corporation), Senior Research Scientist at Telcordia Technologies (Bellcore), Chief Technology Officer at Arepa, Inc. (Into Networks), and a member of the technical staff at Sun Microsystems. Mr. Atkins also served as President of IHTFP Consulting, Inc., an Atlanta-based consulting firm he founded in 2001, which provided Internet and computer system security services.

Mr. Atkins is the Vice-Chair of the RISC-V Crypto Extensions Work Group. He also serves on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet standardization body. As a member of the IETF, he was instrumental in the design and standardization of several major Internet protocols, including the OpenPGP and Instant Messaging protocols. He currently serves on the IETF’s Security Directorate. Mr. Atkins formerly served as chairman of the Open Web Authorization (Oauth), Kerberized Internet Negotiation of Keys, and the Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol Working Groups, and as a security guru on the IETF’s Domain Name System Directorate.

Mr. Atkins holds several patents in the area of secure content delivery. Publications authored by Mr. Atkins include “The Magic Words are Squeamish Ossifrage” in AsiaCrypt ’94, “Scaling the Web of Trust: Combining Kerberos and PGP to Provide Large Scale Authentication” published at Usenix 1995, and “Media Bank: Access and Access Control” published in 1995 by the MIT Media Lab. Mr. Atkins earned his Bachelor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a Master's degree in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.