Our Mission
At Datica Research we build assurances into cyber systems, thus giving users the confidence that their technologies are performing according to specifications and in compliance with control policies.
Our Story
GENESIS
John Manferdelli and Paul England started their collaboration at Microsoft in the early days of hardware-based platform security. Building on their expertise in cryptography and secure enclaves, John and Paul led the early work in inventing what is now widely known as confidential computing.
THE PROBLEM WE SEE
Confidential computing was intended to protect specific, low-level components of the computing system. Today, it is being considered for much larger applications. However, more work needs to be done to scale this approach.
WHAT WE WORK ON
As inventors of confidential computing, we believe in its potential. With appropriate development and implementation, confidential computing could significantly enhance security and safety assurances for computing systems, data, and applications.
Principals
Excellence through good work.
DR John L. Manferdelli, NAE
John Manferdelli is a principal at Datica Research. He is also Chairman of the National Academy of Sciences' Forum on Cyber Resilience, Chair of the National Academies' consensus study on cyber hard problems, and member of the Defense Science Board (DSB).
Before joining Datica, John worked at VMWare, where he was the principal designer (alongside Ye Li) of the Certifier Framework for Confidential Computing, an open-source project he continues to contribute to. His prior roles include Director for Production Security Development at Google and Senior Principal Engineer at Intel Corporation, where he co-led the Intel Science and Technology Center for Secure Computing at UC Berkeley (with David Wagner). He also held leadership roles at Microsoft, where he worked on Trustworthy Computing (with Paul England), and headed up Microsoft Security. Before that, he co-founded Natural Language Incorporated (with Jerrold Ginsparg), which was later acquired by Microsoft.
John's journey through computing included Bell Labs, LLNL, and TRW. Along the way, he also found time to teach mathematics and computer science at Stevens Institute of Technology, University of Washington, and UC Berkeley. He was also a member of the Information Science and Technology advisory group at DARPA.
John was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for his pioneering work advancing Confidential Computing.
John’s professional interests include cryptography and cryptographic mathematics, combinatorial mathematics, operating systems, and computer security. He is author of many papers on computer security, high performance computing, cryptography, quantum computing, computer security and signal processing and has been awarded many patents. He is also a licensed Radio Amateur (AI6IT).
John has a bachelor’s degree in physics from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley.
DR Paul E. England, NAE
Paul England led or contributed to most of the computer industry’s hardware-based security innovations of the last 25 years. Most notable is the field of Trusted Computing: a combination of novel cryptographic operations together with hardware/software environments for secure computation. Trusted Computing primitives are now a feature of most modern computer systems. These features are the security foundation for Microsoft (and other) clouds and are increasingly used for edge devices. In 2018 Paul was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for this work.
Paul has worked closely with industry and standards groups to deliver the necessary hardware security building blocks. Paul led the development of the TPM specification and reference implementation, as well as co-designing many of the silicon security features we use today (TrustZone, various kinds of secure and authenticated boot, SGX-precursors, etc.) At Microsoft, he worked closely with business groups to develop features based on the hardware innovations, including a 4-year stint in Windows where Paul was the lead architect for Microsoft’s disk encryption technology.
More recently, Paul led a government-industry initiative to improve the resilience and recoverability of computer systems in the face of cyber-attack as well as a minimal root-of-trust called DICE, which is becoming standard in all programmable devices: everything CPUs, microcontrollers and storage controllers, to full systems like GPUs, smart-NICs, and networking equipment.
Outside hardware-based security, Paul has recently led Microsoft’s work in establishing trustworthy provenance chains for digital media. This work started as a hedge against deep-fakes and other misinformation and the standards Paul developed are now used by all major generative AI services and several news organizations.
Paul serves on several National Academy committees charged with advising on United States cyber-security policies and has advised other European countries. Paul has a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from Imperial College of Science and Technology.
DR Tho H. Nguyen
After escaping university with the standard set of degrees, Tho tried his luck at building data centers (overseas, no less). With only a few wins under his belt, competition got tough and he jumped ship to join the National Science Foundation. There, he helped shape the Cyber Physical Systems program in its early days (with David Corman). Somewhere in there he also had a significant hand in developing the NSF Smart and Connected Communities program. Leaving the dark side, Tho returned to academia and joined the University of Virginia as a Senior Scientist in the Computer Science Department. There, he managed research in processing-in-memory (with Kevin Skadron) and worked with the VP for IT (Ron Hutchins) to build out UVA Research Computing. Tho shepherded UVA’s largest-to-date NSF Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant to build ACCORD, a new cyberinfrastructure supporting multi-institutions collaboration on sensitive research data.
Tho is an experienced program manager. He organizes and directs a national committee on cyber security. He has managed national consensus studies on topics such as post-exascale high performance computing, cyber resiliency hard problems, software assurance and nimbleness, machine learning in safety-critical applications, Digital Twins, and semiconductor security - all of which means he's highly effective at getting people to agree on things.
A Fulbright scholar, NSF PI, DoS PI, AAAS S&T Policy Fellow, NSF IGERT grantee, etc., Tho’s adventures in computing has been generously supported by multiple grants and awards from government and industry. The common theme and enduring interest throughout his career has been to figure out how to reason about and responsibly manage data. At Datica, Tho works on mapping user requirements to control policies and technical mechanisms.
Tho has a PhD (and an MS, a BS, and a BA), all from the University of Washington in Electrical Engineering - except for the BA, which was for Applied and Computational Math (he can't really recall how that happened).
While we don't think that perfect security exists, we believe that better security is always possible. Secure solutions are built from formalizing the right policies, proving the rigorous math, and building correctness from the hardware layer.
This is easier said then done, by a lot.
Thus, achieving better security also requires knowing where things stand (i.e., see through the hype) and what steps are needed to get to where we want. Building on deep, pioneering, and successful (and failed) experiences, we are clear on the mission and excited for the work ahead.
