Hacking the Hacker

7Profile: Michael Howard

Michael Howard is infectious. He’s a great educator, an energetic speaker, and after nearly 20 years is as passionate about his computer security specialty, secure code, as he was in the beginning. It’s hard to be around him more than a few minutes without you wanting to help make the world more secure one line of code at a time. He first gained worldwide notice for co‐authoring Writing Secure Code (https://www.amazon.com/Writing‐Secure‐Code‐Michael‐Howard/dp/0735615888) along with David LeBlanc and for being a significant part of the reason why Microsoft is hugely dedicated to writing more secure code. Howard, originally from New Zealand but now living in Austin, TX, has co‐written several books on writing more secure code and is a frequent blogger.

NOTE

David LeBlanc, Howard’s co‐author on Writing Secure Code, is another forward‐looking security practitioner. He is responsible for making Microsoft Office significantly more secure, and he created a more secure browser security model that ended up being used by Google, Adobe, and Microsoft.

I asked Howard how he got into computer security. He replied, “I was working on very early versions of Windows NT for Microsoft. I was doing fairly low‐level stuff like access control, cryptography, and custom GINAs (graphical interfaces which used to be the way you logged into and authenticated by Microsoft Windows and other authentication providers). This really led me to start thinking about security‐as‐a‐feature ...