The Distinguished Speaker for the 17th ACSAC Conference will be Dr. Robert Blakley. Dr. Robert Blakley is Chief Scientist for Security at Tivoli Systems Inc., an IBM company.

Dr. Blakley was chief scientist for DASCOM, Inc. at the time of its acquisition by IBM and integration into Tivoli. Before joining DASCOM, Dr. Blakley was lead security architect for IBM where he was employed for nine years. During that time he was responsible for security architecture and design for OS/2, the IBM OS/2 LAN server, IBM's OS/2 and AIX DCE offerings, the LAN distance remote LAN access product, and IBM's ORB technologies, including Distributed SOM and Component Broker.

In addition to his product design responsibilities, Dr. Blakley led the IBM Security Architecture Board and was the IBM representative to the Open Group Security Program Group. He also served for two years as the chair of the OSF DME/DCE security-working group. He is the author of "CORBA Security: An Introduction to Safe Computing with Objects", published by Addison-Wesley. Dr. Blakley was also the editor of the Open Group PKI working group's "Architecture for Public Key Infrastructure" guideline and the Open Group's Authorization API specification. He is currently the general editor of the OASIS Security Services Technical Committee's SAML specification effort. Blakley has been involved in cryptography and data security design work since 1979 and has authored or co-authored seven papers on cryptography, secret-sharing schemes, access control, and other aspects of computer security. He holds nine patents on security-related technologies.

In 1997 and 1998, Dr. Blakley co-chaired the ACM New Security Paradigms Workshop. He is currently vice-chair of the IEEE Security and Privacy Conference, and has served on the Program Committees for several industry and academic conferences, including the NSA/OMG Distributed Object Computing Workshop, IEEE Security and Privacy, ACM New Security Paradigms, and ISOC Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS).

Dr. Blakley received an A.B. in classics from Princeton University, and a master's degree and Ph.D. in computer and communications sciences from the University of Michigan.