Avishai Wool

Wool worked at Bell Labs, where he helped build tools for analysing firewall rules offline, before becoming a professor at Tel Aviv University. His paper A Quantitative Study of Firewall Configuration Errors (2004) went through real corporate rulesets and found serious mistakes in nearly all of them. Errors grew with ruleset size: small rulesets could be kept clean, large ones in practice never were.

That was awkward for an industry selling the firewall as the box you buy and are then done with. Wool co-founded AlgoSec, which makes tools for auditing and cleaning up exactly those rulesets — one of the few times an academic error statistic has turned straight into a business plan.