Mary Ellen Zurko

Mary Ellen Zurko leads security architecture and strategy for Lotus Workplace, Portal, and Collaboration Software at IBM. She was security architect for IBM Lotus Workplace collaboration products, and has owned active content security and authorization for Lotus Notes and Domino products.

She was a member of the team that designed and developed the first freeware reference implementation of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Public Key Infrastructure X.509 (PKIX) standards, called Jonah.

As a senior research fellow at the Open Group Research Institute, she led several innovative security initiatives in authorization policies, languages, and mechanisms that incorporate user-centered design elements.

Mary Ellen has written on active content security, public key infrastructures, distributed authorization, user-centered security, and security and the web. She has worked in security since 1986, starting on a high assurance virtual machine monitor at Digital Equipment Corporation. She is a contributor to the O.Reilly book, "Security and Usability: Designing Secure Systems that People Can Use".

She has degrees in computer science from MIT and is on the steering committees of the International WWW Conference series and New Security Paradigms Workshop. Mary Ellen is general co-chair of WWW2007, in Banff.