C. Matthew Curtin, CISSP

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 were 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.