Nicko van Someren

Nicko van Someren
Citizenship British
Alma mater University of Cambridge
Scientific career
Fields Computer Science
Doctoral advisor Neil Wiseman

Dr. Nicholas Nicko van Someren PhD, FREng, FBCS (born 1967) is a British computer scientist, cryptographer and entrepreneur. He is known for having founded ANT Software Limited, and nCipher as well as more recently having been the Chief Security Architect at Juniper Networks and is currently the Chief Technology Officer of the Linux Foundation where he runs the Core Infrastructure Initiative.[1]

Education and Early life

Van Someren attended King College Choir School in Cambridge, UK before receiving a scholarship to Oakham School in Rutland. He went on to study as an undergraduate in Computer Science at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he subsequently earned a PhD.[2]

Van Someren credits his interest in business to his father, who ran a business from their home when he was young.[3] While still at school van Someren took summer jobs with Acorn Computers and acquired an interest in cryptography by reading about public key encryption in Scientific American.[4]

Businesses

In 1992 Nicko van Someren and his brother Alex van Someren, along with two friends, founded ANT Ltd.[5] to build networking hardware. While with ANT, van Someren wrote the first version of the Fresco web browser which helped the company move from being primarily a hardware company to a software company. ANT Plc. went public on the London Alternative Investments Market in March 2005.[6] In February 2013 ANT was acquired by Espial Group.[7]

In 1996 van Someren, along with his brother Alex co-founded nCipher[8] to build high speed cryptographic accelerators and Hardware Security Modules. nCipher went public on the London Stock Exchange on October 2000, at the time valuing the company at around £450 million.[9] In October 2008 nCipher Plc. was acquired by Thales Group.[10]

In 2011 van Someren joined Good Technology as CTO.[11] He remained with Good until its acquisition by BlackBerry Limited in 2015.

Accomplishments

In 2008 Dr. van Someren was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering[12] in the UK.

Work in computer security

Van Someren has published numerous papers in the field of computer security. In 1998 he co-authored a paper[13] with Adi Shamir introducing the concept of key finding attacks. A statistical key finding attack was used by van Someren to locate the signature verification keys used by Microsoft to validate the signatures on MS-CAPI plug-ins. One of these key was later discovered to be referred to as the NSAKEY by Microsoft, sparking some controversy.[14]

References

  1. ↑ The Linux Foundation Appoints New Chief Technology Officer, Open Source Community Veterans to Executive Team
  2. ↑ PhD graduates of the Rainbow Group
  3. ↑ Interview: Alex and Nicko van Someren
  4. ↑ Me and My Partner: Alex Van Someren And Nicko Van Someren
  5. ↑ Cambridge Ring Hall of Fame: Companies started by Computer Lab graduates and staff
  6. ↑ ANT goes public in UK on back of surge in IPTV deployments
  7. ↑ Espial Completes Acquisition ANT plc
  8. ↑ Time Global Business August 2003 / Tech Survivors: nCipher, Nicko and Alex van Someren
  9. ↑ nCipher braces itself for choppy waters after IPO
  10. ↑ Thales completes nCipher acquisition
  11. ↑ Good Technology Hires Security Expert, Nicko van Someren, as New CTO
  12. ↑ List of Fellows – Royal Academy of Engineering
  13. ↑ Shamir, Adi; van Someren, Nicko (1 January 1998). "Playing Hide and Seek With Stored Keys". Lecture Notes in Computer Science: 118–124.
  14. ↑ "Microsoft/NSA Info". 17 June 2000. Archived from the original on 17 June 2000. Retrieved 12 October 2016.
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