CyLab

Distinguished Seminar: Crossing a Chasm - The Journey from Lab Prototype to Commercial Product

October 29, 2018

11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. ET

CIC, Panther Hollow Room

Rick Linger
Chief Technology Officer
Lenvio Inc

This event is part of the CyLab Distinguished Seminar Series.

Abstract

Commercializing laboratory R&D is a long and difficult process fraught with risk and uncertainty. It is indeed well described as a chasm to be crossed. In this talk, I’ll describe my personal experience with this process as a technologist with no prior commercialization experience. The purpose is to provide insights for others contemplating commercial application of their research. There were many steps along the way, with much help, often from unanticipated sources, to keep the journey moving. The work began with R&D at the Software Engineering Institute, progressed to a lab prototype at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and eventually was licensed to a start-up for commercialization. The research was initially motivated by a fundamental cyber security problem: Software with unknown behavior has unknown security, because unknown behavior can harbor malicious content. The technology developed is a form of analysis that computes behaviors code can exhibit in order to detect the presence of malware, analyze its functionality, and provide means to help protect against its variants. The technology has now been commercialized as a product platform and is currently in operational use to improve enterprise cyber security. A next-generation system incorporating additional capabilities is under development.

 

Speaker Bio

Rick Linger

Mr. Linger is CTO of Lenvio Inc., a cybersecurity technology company. He formerly served as a Senior Cyber Security Researcher in the Cyber and Information Intelligence Research Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and as Research Director for the Dartmouth Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P), a consortium of 26 universities and national laboratories.

Prior to that, he managed the CERT Survivable Systems Engineering Group at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where he focused on cyber security analysis methods, software assurance curriculum development, foundations for computing software behaviors, and development of rigorous software engineering processes for large-scale systems. At IBM, he conducted research in mathematical foundations for software development and correctness verification and applied these foundations to development of IBM Program Products. He is co-creator of the Cleanroom Software Engineering and Agile Research processes and has received SEI Creativity and R&D 100 awards. His previous work included software development and orbital mechanics analysis for NASA space programs. Mr. Linger is a Senior Member of the IEEE and AIAA.  He has authored or coauthored three software engineering textbooks, a dozen book chapters, and more than 90 technical papers and articles.   

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