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Women of Influence 2005

The Executive Women's Forum awards program celebrating female infosecurity achievement recognizes a quartet of pioneers.

Exercising Influence: "My background is in requirements engineering. So my training has always been in understanding what people want in a system. What are their needs, and how do we go about satisfying those needs? It's very clear that there's a natural tension between the concerns individuals have about the collection and use of their sensitive information and the concerns that companies and government agencies who collect and use that information have. When I first started working in this area I had a very naive and idealistic view that we could satisfy everyone. But the solutions that will satisfy the public are really in direct conflict with what companies and government want and need. So I put together a team at N.C. State [consisting] of a sociologist, a lawyer, an economist, and we're basically working toward social, technical and legal solutions that can help satisfy all of these conflicting viewpoints."

Much of AntÃ³n's work addresses the problem of how well business policies are reflected within technology systemsâ¬for example, does software support compliance? "Everybody has these little checklistsâ¬yes, we're encrypting, yes we're doing this. But are they really really satisfying [these conditions] inside their systems? I would say they're not; we hear about breaches all the time. So we're trying to develop tools and methodologies that will help companies actually be able to enforce that compliance with confidence."

Influencing the Security Future: "[I'm interested in] getting the public to understand threats to security and privacy. We've been trying to do that at The Privacy Place [www.theprivacyplace.org]. Also as a country we need to increase support for researchâ¬we need to establish some formal repeatable mechanisms that we can use for measuring and supporting security and privacy."