Dan has a long-term view of informations security, and has codified some of his thinking in a white paper entitled The Shrinking Perimeter -- Making the Case for Data Level Risk Management.

"As the threat increases the security perimeter skrinks," he says. But as we try protecting assets at the file-object level, access control will prove to be unscalable. The solution, Dan says, is the introduction of accountability--tracking objects, not people. It's a fascinating topic, sure to give you plenty to think about.

Dan ran the development arm of MIT’s project Athena during the period when Kerberos and the X Windows system were developed there and his recent focus has remained on security and risk management. He has co-written several books, testified before Congress and advised the Federal Trade Commission, the Nation Science Foundation, the Treasury Department, the National Research Counsel, the Department of Defense and other organizations.

But he is more recently known as the guy who was fired for co-authoring a report, Cyber Insecurity, suggesting the security risks posed by the monoculture caused by Microsoft's dominance of the software industry.

You'll hear it all in this interview with a true IT visionary.