Crispin Cowan has been in the computer business for 25 years, and security for 10 years. He was the CTO and founder of Immunix, Inc., acquired by Novell in 2005. Dr. Cowan is now a security program manager in the Microsoft Core Operating System Division, working on security features for Windows. Dr. Cowan developed several host security technologies under DARPA funding, including prominent technologies like the StackGuard compiler defense against buffer overflows, and the LSM (Linux Security Modules) interface in Linux 2.6. Dr. Cowan also co-invented the "time-to-patch" method of assessing when it is safe to apply a security patch. Prior to founding Immunix, he was a professor with the Oregon Graduate Institute. He is the program co-chair for the 2007 and 2008 Network and Distributed System Security conferences. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario and a Masters of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo.</p>