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OCS 2020 Breakout: John Althouse, Salesforce

John Althouse is a leader and serial inventor in cyber security.

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John Althouse is the creator of JA3, A method for profiling SSL/TLS Clients

You are a cyber-security inventor and you’ve been at Salesforce since 2012, now leading Threat Detection at Salesforce. What drew you to cyber security early on and how did you find yourself at Salesforce? - 0:00

(Talking about Salesforce) So you’ve joined one of the most meaningful and important software companies, certainly the largest SaaS company, to see the growth from a tiny (less than 10 person) cybersecurity team to over a 1000 people. How critical has open source been to a lot of that for you? Can you talk about the dynamics of open source as it relates to growing a cybersecurity function? - 3:57

In your career, you created some new methods and technologies that are really exciting. What’s your general approach to identifying a problem and creating a solution? - 6:07

What are your most proud inventions over the years, and could you give us an overview of some of them? - 8:03

Could you educate the audience on what fingerprinting means and what kind of technology goes behind the fingerprinting? - 12:08

Salesforce is a proprietary technology SaaS company, but you build on a huge amount of open source. In addition to that, you also create and produce a lot. I wasn’t aware you are creating so many projects, you mentioned around 100 projects per year are added on the GitHub repo. You’ve released projects in natural language processing, machine learning, policy management, Kubernetes, knowledge management… Can you give us an overview of security projects that Salesforce has contributed to? - 13:45

I would refer people to github.com/salesforce. What are the most exciting areas in cybersecurity that are you paying attention to these days, related or unrelated to open source? - 17:35


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