Leadership

Stephen is a principal program manager working in the Azure team at Microsoft and leads the Governing Board for the Confidential Computing Consortium. Prior to that he was a Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Stephen has been a technical executive, a founder, a writer, a systems developer, a software construction geek, and a standards diplomat. He has worked in the IT industry since 1980 as both customer and vendor, working with open source for 25 years. He blogs about open source and software business at “Once More unto the Breach”, opensource.com, and on Medium.

Mike Bursell joined Red Hat in August 2016 in the Office of the CTO, following roles working on security, virtualisation and networking. After training in software engineering, he specialised in distributed systems and security, and has worked in architecture and technical strategy for the past few years. His responsibilities at Red Hat include security strategy, external and internal visibility, and thought leadership. He is one of the co-founders of the Enarx project (https://enarx.io). He regularly speaks at industry events in Europe, North America and APAC.

Professional interests include: Linux, confidential computing, open source software, security, distributed systems, blockchain, NFV, SDN, virtualisation.

Mike has an MA from the University of Cambridge and an MBA from the Open University.

Dave Thaler is a Software Architect at Microsoft, where he works on IoT security.  Dave has over 25 years of standards body experience and currently chairs the IETF group on Software Update for IoT, as well as the Confidential Computing Consortium’s Technical Advisory Council.  He previously served as a member of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) for 11 years.  He chaired IETF groups on Trusted Execution Environment provisioning, NAT behavior, the Port Control Protocol, and multicast address allocation, and has authored over 55 IETF and IAB publications (RFCs). Dave has 20 years of development experience in Windows networking, and has also been a contributor to a number of open source cross-platform projects.  He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Michigan.

Seth is the Vice President of Marking at Fortanix. Fortanix solves cloud security and privacy challenges, allowing customers to securely operate even the most sensitive applications without having to trust their infrastructure. Fortanix encrypts applications and data everywhere – at rest, in motion, and in use with its Runtime Encryption® technology built upon Intel® SGX. Fortune 500 customers worldwide trust Fortanix to protect their business-critical data and operations. Fortanix is a Gartner Cool Vendor and a Series B company funded by Intel Capital, Foundation Capital and NeoTribe.

Jethro G. Beekman is working on next-generation cloud computing security at Fortanix. Jethro received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California at Berkeley in 2014 and 2016, respectively. Before that, he received his B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Twente, The Netherlands, in 2011. His current research interests include cloud security, secure enclaves, side-channel countermeasures, as well as network and hardware security.

Richard is a Senior Security Architect at Fortanix and currently General Member’s Representative to the Governing Board of the Confidential Computing Consortium. He gained a Doctorate in Business Administration from Henley Business School by developing a formal mathematical model of perceptual change and has had an extensive career in systems engineering, with recent projects in the field of natural language processing and computational propaganda. By leveraging the integrity and confidentiality guarantees offered by Intel® SGX; Richard is currently working with Fortanix’ customers to enable secure applications deployment, multi-party computation and data analytics, at scale, using private and public cloud infrastructures.

Stephano Cetola is a technical program manager at the Linux Foundation working on the Confidential Computing Consortium. He has worked on and managed numerous open source initiatives in software and hardware. Before coming to the Linux Foundation, Stephano was employed at Intel contributing to the Yocto Project building embedded Linux distros and working on TianoCore, an open source implementation of UEFI. Along with working for the CCC, he helps to develop technical specifications for RISC-V International and is involved in research at Portland State University focusing on Trusted Execution Environments. Throughout his career Stephano has been a tireless proponent of open source software, firmware, and hardware.