Mary Ellen Zurko

Mary Ellen Zurko is a technical staff member in the Cyber Operations and Analysis Technology Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. She has worked in product development, early product prototyping, and research, and has more than 20 patents. She defined the field of user-centered security in 1996, and has worked in cybersecurity for over 35 years. She was the security architect of one of IBM’s earliest clouds. She was a founding member of the National Academies’ Forum on Cyber Resilience and serves as a Distinguished Expert for the National Security Agency’s Best Scientific Cybersecurity Research Paper competition. Her research interests include unusable security for attackers, zero trust architectures for government systems, security development and code security, authorization policies, high-assurance virtual machine monitors, the web, and public key infrastructure. Zurko received SB and SM degrees in computer science from MIT. She has been the only “Mary Ellen Zurko” on the web for over 25 years.