Rachna Dhamija, Founder and CEO

Rachna Dhamija is a pioneer in the movement to apply usability, psychology and human behavior to computer security.

Rachna worked on electronic payment system privacy and security at CyberCash before receiving her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley for her dissertation entitled “Authentication for Humans: The Design and Analysis of Usable Security Systems.” After Berkeley, Rachna was appointed as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society, and later as an Entrepreneurial Fellow at CommerceNet.

Dr. Dhamija speaks often at industry and academic conferences, corporations, and R&D groups. Her landmark papers “The Battle Against Phishing: Dynamic Security Skins” (2005) and “Why Phishing Works” (2006) have been heavily cited in academic and industry publications. Her more recent papers include “The Emperor's New Security Indicators” (2007) and “The Seven Flaws of Identity Management” (2008).

For a full listing of her papers, see her publications page.

Rachna is often quoted in media coverage of security vulnerabilities, and her research results have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and CNN.

Allan Schiffman, Founder and CTO

Allan M. Schiffman's 30-year career has included significant contributions as an engineer and entrepreneur in programming languages, object-oriented design, software tools, communications security protocols and electronic commerce systems.

Most recently, he's been executive director of CommerceNet, having instituted its investment activities and fellows program. He's advisor to and a member of the board of several CommerceNet portfolio companies. Prior to CommerceNet, he was founder and CTO of Terisa Systems, a pioneer in Web security. Earlier, Allan was CTO at Enterprise Integration Technologies, a leader in the development of Internet e-commerce and the creator of CommerceNet.

Allan played a significant role in creating many innovative systems that paved the way for electronic commerce, including Mastercard/Visa's payment card protocol (SET), the first Web security protocol (S-HTTP), and the first secure Web browser (Secure Mosaic, deployed by CommerceNet in 1994). He was an author of the National Research Council report “Trust in Cyberspace” and was on Netscape's security advisory board and the World Wide Web Consortium's security advisory board. He holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.