Rebecca Gurley Bace is a security technology expert, author, and entrepreneur. Named by Information Security Magazine as one of the five most influential women in security today (1993), she is a Venture Consultant for Trident Capital, where she oversees security investments for the Palo Alto-based firm. She is also President/CEO of Infidel, Inc., a network security consulting practice headquartered in Scotts Valley, California.
Ms. Bace is the lead faculty member for the Institute for Applied Network Security, where she moderates the popular Network Security Forum, a quarterly professional development program for senior Information Security Managers. She has also served on the Technical Advisory Boards of many successful network security startups including Security Focus, Intruvert Networks, TriCipher, Tripwire, Qualys, Sygate, SecureWorks, AirTight, and Arxan.
Her consulting engagements have run the gamut from advising investment firms to building operational security policies for online businesses. These tasks build upon information security expertise developed during Ms. Bace’s thirteen years in government service, the first twelve as a senior electronics engineer for the National Security Agency. She led the Computer Misuse and Anomaly Detection (CMAD) Research program from 1989 through 1995. During this time, she served as a charter member of NSA’s Information Security (Infosec) Research and Technology Group (R2).
Ms. Bace’s research collaborations with the FBI produced a manual for Computer Crime Investigation. (Computer Crime – A Crimefighter’s Handbook, O’Reilly, 1995) She is credited with building a national community that connected early network security researchers with government organizations, including the Air Force Information Warfare Center and the FBI’s first Computer Crime Squad. She provided seed funding for the COAST (now CERIAS) project at Purdue University and the Security Lab at University of California, Davis. Ms. Bace received a Distinguished Leadership Award in recognition of her work building the CMAD community.
Ms. Bace left NSA in 1996 to become the Deputy Security Officer for the Computing, Information, and Communications Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In this role, she was charged with determining protection strategies that allowed the Laboratory to balance needs for security with needs for availability and performance. In 1997, she started Infidel, Inc. with partners Terri Gilbert and Christopher Wee.
Ms. Bace is also a noted author on topics in intrusion detection and network security, with credits including Intrusion Detection (Macmillan Technical Publishing, 2000), A Guide to Forensic Testimony (with Fred Smith) (Addison Wesley, 2002), the Intrusion Detection Special Publication for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the chapter on intrusion detection and vulnerability assessment for the Computer Security Handbook, Fourth Edition, (Wiley, 2002).
Bace holds the Master of Engineering Science (Electrical, with concentration in Digital Systems) from Loyola College.