C. Matthew Curtin, CISSP
Founder, Interhack Corporation
Lecturer, The Ohio State University
Matt Curtin is a Columbus-based technologist, writer,
and entrepreneur. His work has helped to shape our
understanding of the benefits and risks of living in a
globally-connected world. He helped to develop the
technical infrastructure for some of the earliest
electronic commerce Web sites and to show others how
to use technology such as network firewalls and
cryptography to protect their data and their
users.
During the Crypto Wars of the mid to late 1990s,
Curtin was an integral part of a seminal distributed
computing project that broke a message encrypted with
the U.S. Government's Data Encryption Standard for the
first time in open research, changing the tone of the
debate in Congress over cryptographic policy and
hastening the demise of the standard. The story of
this work is the subject of his most recent book,
Brute Force:
Cracking the Data Encryption Standard
(Copernicus Books, 2005).
Curtin founded Interhack in 1997 as a research group
that looked at the side-effects of using the Internet
as a large-scale computing and communication platform.
Interhack's
Internet
Privacy Project looked at the
Internet infrastructure and how real systems used for
online banking, navigation, advertising, and even
enhanced DVD and CD content put unsuspecting consumers
at risk. Results of this work was reported in the
media worldwide and have served as foundation material
for discussion in computer science programs throughout
the United States and Europe. Curtin's previous book,
Developing
Trust: Online Privacy and Security
(Apress, 2001) discusses these matters in detail.
In 2000, Curtin organized Interhack Corporation and
its professional service practices in
Forensic
Computing and
Information Assurance.
Interhack's forensic computing practice and Curtin's
expert opinion have been used to establish the leading
case law on the application of Federal wiretap
statutes to Web technology,
In re Pharmatrak
Privacy Litigation.
Curtin maintains a regular academic appointment as a
Lecturer at The Ohio State University's Department of
Computer Science and Engineering, teaching a popular
course in the use of the Lisp programming language.
Additionally, he has guest lectured for the Privacy
Foundation at the University of Denver's Sturm College
of Law, Otterbein College, Franklin University, the
Keller Graduate School of Management at DeVry
University.
Curtin chairs the Recruitment subcommittee of the
Business Advisory Network that advises the Ohio
Department of Education's standards for technology
education in secondary and postsecondary schools
throughout the state and is a member of the
USENIX Association, the Association for Computing
Machinery, and the IEEE Computer Society.
