All about Steve

Currently, I'm a senior manager at Sourcefire, and serve as a technical lead developer for the Snort Open Source IDS/IPS. My management responsibilities are for the Snort and RNA products. My development work on Snort includes a rewrite of the TCP Stream processor -- Stream5 (Snort 2.7.0), feature updates and maintenance of the IP defragmentation handler (Snort 2.4), the shared object rule engine (Snort 2.6.0), as well as protocol decoders for FTP/Telnet and DNS (2.6.0). More recently, I have been responsible for designing and implementing performance improvements to Snort's rule evaluation (Snort 2.8.2), and HTTP Inspect preprocessor (Snort 2.8.3). I am also involved with the architecture and the IP defragmentation module for SnortSP project. From my work on Snort, I have a number of patents pending relating to IP Defragmentation, TCP Reassembly, TCP Timestamps, and Performance. I've also worked with Intel on pattern matching algorithms and hardware implementations to improve performance. As part of this effort, I was a co-author on a white paper published by Intel.

For a short while, I was a Principal Engineer and consultant with Platform Logic before the company was acquired by Symantec. I was responsible for policy development and management of the unix versions (Solaris and Linux) of the Appfire Product. I was also the lead designer & developer for a rewrite of the AppFire agent from Java to C++. The AppFire Product works in conjunction with anti-virus and IDS products, but the distinction is that AppFire provides a first-line of defense against both viruses and other intrusion attacks.

For 3 years, I worked from home as a Principal Software Engineer with Baltimore Technolgoies. Baltimore was based in Dublin, Ireland and had development offices in Boston and Sydney, Austrailia as well. Shortly before I left at the end of 2003, Baltimore sold their main PKI business to beTRUSTed, who has since merged with another company to become CyberTrust -- ironically the name of the group Baltimore bought from GTE a few years earlier. CyberTrust is now owned by Verizon Business, part of Verizon, which was the result of the merger of GTE and Bell Atlantic. While with Baltimore, I was responsible for some of the core components of the UniCERT. product, specifically, the RA eXchanger and CMP (RFC2510/2511) and EMail (SMTP, POP3) Protocol Handlers. The RA eXchange (RAX) provides a common interface to the RA for the various protocol handlers (CMP, EMail, SCEP, Web). The CMP Handler acts as a gateway to submit PKIX CMP certificate requests to UniCERT. The EMail Handler handles both PKCS#10 and PEM-encoded X509 certificate requests, as well as sending out notification emails for certificate request status (Pending, Rejected, etc.) and delivering newly issued Certificates in PKCS#7, X509, and PEM-encoded X509 formats. Here is a report on UniCERT from the NSS PKI Group test. I was also one of two developers for the KeyTools Certificate Path Validation Module, and I was the primary developer of a CMP message handling snap-in component to KeyTools. The CMP snap-in is delivered in conjunction with UniCERT.

Prior to returning to my roots in the area of computer security, I attempted to jump on the internet startup bandwagon and joined Outreach Technologies as a Senior Software Engineer, acting as both audio team lead and a software engineer for the Embrace product. Embrace was a Audio-Data conferencing system, which coordinated the use of standard telephone conferencing and data conferencing via the internet. I was involved in rearchitecting the Audio portion of Embrace to easily scale to more audio channels, support reservationless/first come-first served conferencing, and to provide auto-linking, a technique that allows conferences on multiple Embrace servers to be joined together to provide virtually limitless conference sizes. While the engineering team finished the Embrace product, it was not sold in sufficient quantities and Outreach has since folded.

Before trying my luck with a startup, I was a Network Security Engineer with BBN/GTE CyberTrust (purchased by Baltimore Technologies in early 2000) serving as both a software developer and task lead for the Personal Security Manager RA and Embedded Systems Toolkit, which is designed to provide application developers the ability to PKI-enable their application using digital certificates from the CyberTrust Certificate Authority. The toolkit was used by VPN vendors to provide cost-effective VPN solutions.

During my summers off from college and as my first job, I was a Software Analyst with Trusted Information Systems, Inc. TIS was sold to Network Associates (now McAfee) in 1998. I was involved in the development of Network Telecommunication, Multipoint Data Conferencing, and Multimedia Proxies for the Gauntlet Internet Firewall (now owned by Secure Computing). Prior to working on Gauntlet for Windows NT and Unix, I was a software developer for the Trusted Mach Operating System research project. My work included development of secure microkernel interfaces to export the functions of the microkernel, development of unix device drivers and a trusted virtual file system for the Trusted Mach POSIX OS personality, and setting up a demo which used X11R6 with Trusted Mach. I was also one of the primary developers on Trusted Windows, a B3 Multi-Level Windowing System which is a component of Trusted Mach.

I graduated from Michigan State University in May 1994, with a Masters in Computer Science. While at Michigan State, I was one of the founding members of the MSU chapter of Upsilon Pi Epsilon, an international honor society for the computing sciences. I was a lead graduate assistant for CPS 130 and after graduating, I served as a consultant for the replacement course, CSE 101.

Prior to my graduate studies at Michigan State University, I attended Towson State University (now Towson University), earning a Bachelors of Arts degree in Computer Science and Mathematics. I was a founding member of the Towson State Chapter of UPE. In my "spare" time, I was a member of the Men's Track and Field and Cross Country teams. During my senior year, I worked as an intern at the Space Telescope Sceince Institute, designing a test-based UI for scheduling targets on the Hubble Space Telescope.

I attended Glenelg High School where I was a member of the Cross Country, Indoor Track, and Outdoor Track teams. While I concentrated on distance running, I dabbled in other events, including Pole Vault and Triple Jump. I was also a member of the National Honor Society. Find other Glenelg Alums.