Hugh Thompson

Thompson earned a doctorate in applied mathematics at the Florida Institute of Technology and in 2003 co-wrote How to Break Software Security with James Whittaker — a manual for attacking programs the way a tester would rather than a cryptographer: fill the buffers, yank the dependencies, feed in whatever the developer didn't think of. It helped make security testing part of ordinary QA instead of an annual external pentest.

Since the mid-2000s he has chaired the program committee of RSA Conference, the event Jim Bidzos started at RSA Security, which makes him the one introducing keynotes to tens of thousands of attendees. An odd gig for someone whose best-known text is about making software crash.